This is interesting, how two relatively conservative, fairly influential modern media figures disagreed over whether or not gay marriage is valid. How could gay marriage really be invalid? It seems like nothing more than a bias in accepting that lifestyle, preference, or self-definition as legitimate, doesn't it? One reasonable interpretation seems to be that it's just homophobia, extended to protect an institution regarded as "traditionally straight."
It takes some back and forth to get to it but Matt starts to propose why he sees gay marriage as problematic in this video discussion clip. I commented there trying to help clarify what he started in on but never made clear; let's start with that:
I'm no fan of this guy, and Joe clearly proposed the superior take on definition of marriage here, but there is something Matt wasn't able to clearly express that works. At a societal level if we drop most of the definitions of roles and forms like marriage, being male or female, related to employment status and commitment, other types of self definition and other family roles there will be negative impact. And probably some positive change, to be fair.
It doesn't work well to take up the God's eye view on what these social forms reinforce, so any final mapping is problematic. It certainly doesn't work to apply concern about broad societal cultural changes to individual imperatives, or role or relationship definitions, like that of marriage.
In one sense Matt is saying that gay marriage just doesn't work for him personally, but there's a deeper and potentially more reasonable component of that, which starts to question if abandoning many traditional societal roles wouldn't have negative impact on American culture, and on Americans' lives.
The awkward part of his framing is a loose and seemingly meaningless claim that opposes "his" traditional definition of marriage (between a straight man and woman, for the purpose of having and raising children) with a gap on the "other" side, and a claim that there is no good opposing definition. Joe Rogan argues well here (unusual, that), and is more or less proposing that marriage could as easily be seen as any definition of committed monogamy, as a long-term relationship commitment between man and woman, or a gay couple, with or without any intention to have children. That part is odd, that married people should intend to have children for some reason, so I'll just set that aside here.
Grey areas are always going to come up. There's an internet rumor that Joe Rogan is in a somewhat open relationship, that he has binding prenuptial agreement support to pursue physical relationships outside his own marriage, which of course may or may not be true. Setting that aside here works, and open marriages in general, or just not considering if three people couldn't be married. It definitely works best to set aside that Matt Walsh is opposed to transgender acceptance and rights in general.
They never did dig down to the supposed problem, to the layers of why Matt sees gay people being regarded as married in society as problematic. He seemingly wants to retain the use of that pair-bond term and legal definition for straight couples. He probably is uncomfortable with others being gay, so there probably is a personal feeling aspect to this, but it can work to isolate the most reasonable concern, that he's not expressing well, and isolate it, to see how much sense it could possibly make. He seems to think that traditional societal roles are functional, and is concerned that new non-traditional definitions and roles won't work as well. He just stops short of clarifying that concern here.
As a starting point let's use a hypothetical approach, and move back to a more standard definition of marriage from the US in 1950.
Traditional marriage in the US in 1950
Before even treating this gender preference issue it's worth noting that mixed race marriages were not always legal in the US, and the shift to broad acceptance of those probably came after 1950, along with repealing some of the laws preventing this. It's a bit of an aside but let's start there, with interracial marriage instead (don't worry, this does connect):
Interracial marriage in the United States has been fully legal in all U.S. states since the 1967 Supreme Court decision that deemed anti-miscegenation state laws unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) with many states choosing to legalize interracial marriage at much earlier dates. Anti-miscegenation laws have played a large role in defining racial identity and enforcing the racial hierarchy. The United States has many ethnic and racial groups, and interracial marriage is fairly common among most of them. Interracial marriages increased from 2% of married couples in 1970 to 7% in 2005[16][17] and 8.4% in 2010.[18]
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data conducted in 2013, 12% of newlyweds married someone of a different race...
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Certes, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (link) |
U.S States, by the date of repeal of anti-miscegenation laws: No laws passed Repealed before 1887 Repealed between 1948 and 1967 Overturned on 12 June 1967
In a sense we are there at the connection already, aren't we? In 1967 all US Southern states were in agreement that people of mixed races could not legally marry, and the rest of the country was in complete agreement that of course they could. 55 years later we're onto a very closely paralleled concern with gay marriage. The Supreme Court backed all the States outside the South in that divide, and extended previous constitutional rights to include marriage between people of different races. A more conservative court could walk that back, as gay marriage has been somewhat universally accepted and then restricted again over the past few years.
What was the perceived problem with inter-racial marriage? It threatened the way that people in the conservative US South viewed race, and surely plenty of conservative and racist individuals elsewhere didn't want people of different races marrying either. To them race was a social construct and also a real thing, based on clearly identifiable genetic and cultural grounds, that enabled people (with their opinions and perspective) to navigate the world. To this opposing view if government and legal precedence accepted this racial mixing it would validate that as a form of perfectly reasonable individual choice, in violation of prior norms. In retrospect it was the norms that had to go, but it probably wasn't so clear at the time, or at least not universally accepted.
To be clear I have two mixed race kids; my wife is Thai, and I'm white and American. Of course I don't see them as a threat to how others arrange their worldviews, or see their existence as somehow less valid than anyone else's.
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where that other direction led, to happy families with more mixed genetics |
Matt Walsh sees a related individual choice as a threat, just in regards to gay people forming families, and taking up the formal role as a married couple instead. Is there anything remotely valid about his perspective? Not really, as a broad imperative that should be applied to everyone who identifies as gay, but he still might have a reasonable point, just not necessarily the one he's trying to make.
Erosion of social constructs
The isolated race theme some conservatives were promoting in the middle of the 20th century in the US surely didn't work out, but it must be hard to identify how that impacted the US. Even if someone could tie negative social trends back to this causal input, for example to try to link racial mixing with crime rates, which would be impossible, there is no way that this ever should have trumped individual free choice, that inter-racial marriage should have stayed illegal to maintain some positive social order or common good. That's Nazi stuff. This is actually still the main tenet of modern white supremacists; they want other people to stop marrying between races, because it suits their preferences. Too bad for them, that no one really cares what they prefer, beyond taking active steps to make sure that their views are not influential related to government policies.
What if a current US social movement was sweeping aside or altering a lot of social constructs at the same time, not just perspectives on race and gender preference, but also gender related roles, what it means to be male or female, related to family structure definition, stability of gender definition across extended time periods (the trans and gender fluid issues), and also how people self-define as employees, citizens, local residents, and so on? Couldn't that potentially build up to be a more serious problem than any one issue?
Maybe. Analyzing this is problematic though. Even if it wasn't a problem to understand these influences, even if these social transitions and cultural cause and effect sequences could be sorted out, identified as they inter-relate, and mapped from causes to final effects, it still wouldn't necessarily tie back to a firm grounds for limiting personal choices. But let's set that concern aside; how would it be remotely possible to identify any one input's effect? Let's try a hypothetical test case, not necessarily one that is going to shed light on this, but to help consider how one to one mapping of one change might get started, and why it would have trouble even getting started.
What if we could analyze two relatively identical societies in relation to just one easily identifiable social role and practice related parameter input; that might work. Let's see if maybe we could consider divorce rate alone in two very comparable countries; maybe it's possible to trace likely outcome patterns from that social input, and maybe the US and Canada could work as examples. Here's a graph to get us started:
That's from 2013, reported in 2016, and the US and Canada aren't on there (cited as currently 2.3 and 2.1 divorces per 1000, respectively, per Google results, so a bit on the higher side). What does that even mean, since we are more accustomed to the rougher stat and half of all US marriages end in divorce? This bullet summary probably helps:
- The current divorce rate in the US is 2.3 persons per 1,000 people.
- Overall, the rate of divorces in America is falling.
- Divorces amongst people aged 50+ years are rising.
- Fewer couples choose to marry than pre-1990.
- The US divorce rate is the third-highest in the world.
- There were around 630,000 divorces in the US in 2020.
Ok then; there is some real social role and practice change. It does seem like it makes some sense that in the long term that roughly half of all US marriages end in divorce, even though we're not really seeing that stat form there. Comparing 2.1 and 2.3% does show a difference, off by 10%, but it's probably not enough to serve as a basis for vague guesses about outcomes. Comparing family stability and then further outcomes between places like the US, Guam, and Peru (at opposite ends of that scale) is also problematic, because so many other cultural differences would factor in. It could help to compare standardized test results for children with married and separated parents across different countries, and if a clear pattern showed up in spite of the cultural differences then maybe that would help narrow down real, single cause related impact.
Of course this hypothetical study example is still a bit problematic. Back at the level of guessing causes for the divorce rates at a glance, no trends seem to jump out related to developed or less developed countries having higher divorce rates, and so on. There is a lot of bunching up of stats between the 2.0 and 2.3 levels in the US and Canada. That earlier cited claim that "the US divorce rate is the third highest in the world" seems a bit questionable, based on this other set of stats, but so what if Guam, Aruba, Belarus and the others really do have a much higher level rate; what would that tell us? I suppose if societal conventions are breaking down this might work as a bell-weather indicator, but even if it could we probably couldn't support that through clear analysis and justification, working back to why (eg. if race, religion, or gender preference concerns are a significant cause).
If a stat that is so easily accessible remains problematic to treat much in terms of cause and effect analysis themes like gay marriage and the impact of trans-gender self-identification must be all the more so.
Considering divorce rates in Thailand
Let's shift over into the opposite extreme, ungrounded hearsay input, versus analyzing clear stats; since I've just lived in a foreign country and culture let's consider how I interpret social changes having an impact here in relation to in the US.
Divorce seems pretty common, to me, but that's a little too anecdotal. My wife's mother (who is elderly, closing in on 80) had 4 siblings, and one didn't marry, three were divorced, and she was widowed, but maybe her own marriage would've held up if not, leading to a 75% divorce rate in their example. One source goes further, claiming that a general rate was 27% in 2006, and 39% in 2016. Looking at other stats and sources doesn't narrow that to a clear number per 1000, to match with what I've mentioned so far.
It does seem to disrupt family member's lives, of course, in those examples I've witnessed. My wife has four closer cousins, and one we're not in such close touch with, and half of those four have been divorced. It adds complexity and stress for their children to grow up in divided households, or to live with brothers and sisters from different parents. The cousin that isn't close is from the first wife of an uncle we aren't in touch with; those kinds of ties are impacted.
It's hard to get any feel for general status related to other changes in relation to marriage practices, for example if the impact of increased gay marriage is causing any negative effects, for example if that status is stressful and problematic, as growing up in divided household can be. Gay people can't legally marry in Thailand, so that's going to throw off collecting any stats. I don't know that incidence of non-heterosexual identification is necessarily higher or lower in Thailand, but there is a very culturally embedded and accepted male to female identification change, with the opposite seemingly less common, but also well accepted. Thais don't seem very homophobic, to me; the few gay people I've worked with were treated exactly like everyone else.
Although all this didn't lead anywhere, as considering inter-racial marriage didn't, to me it's still interesting pursuing these thought-model parallels a bit. We will surely never sort out a final societal negative impact (and positive outcomes) from more widespread gay marriage, but perhaps we can learn from comparing it to other related and better known circumstances. If there is no way to clearly identify cause and effect for broad trends like divorce rate changes then acting on a presumed possible cause for family structure instability would make no sense, because even if we could accurately isolate a likely potential future cause (eg. society "supporting" gay marriage) we could never really place to what extent that ever happened (acting as a real cause), or didn't happen.
Of course that's still avoiding a main concern: gay couples can have kids whether or not legal protections and benefits of marriage apply to them. It's not likely that slightly more favorable tax deduction options would tip the balance for such decisions.
How could the US government attempt to resolve a "problem" like a high divorce rate, if it came to be seen as problematic? That's a tough one. Applying the opposite of tax incentives, some sort of penalties, probably wouldn't work. Offer counseling? It's just not the place of government to get involved at this level.
Gender fluidity as an extreme case
Let's go further with what I'm trying to get at. This seems like as extreme a case in current self-definitions shifts as we are seeing, with some people rejecting that they should adopt any consistent time-frame gender self-definition role at all, not just in terms of gender neutrality (not participating), but related to form of consistent, active identification. What impact will this have on the stability of society, or an ability for someone to serve as a role model for developing children?
There's no clear way to tell, of course. As far as society goes I think offending sensibilities and not meeting expectations might be the main impact. Gender neutrality has the same effect; people just don't know how to place that. And they don't need to know, unless it somehow becomes relevant to them. Matt Walsh gave a good example of how that might work in that podcast discussion, just not in that clip, describing a negative experience in referring to a person working in a coffee shop as male, a bearded individual wearing a dress. That person was offended, and corrected him.
Relatively little impact there, but Joe and Matt went on to discuss how adding preferred pronouns to their work email footer impacts them. Really, does it? Seemingly not; this turns back to sensibilities. If someone could be processed through HR reaction for mis-gendering, and eventually fired for this, then that's a more practical effect. If what Matt Walsh said had been a crime, responding "thanks, bro," instead of just "thanks" that's another example of when real impact could apply.
It would take impact and outcomes pushing on to this next level for new forms of confusion and inability to relate to have a next level of real effect. That gets tricky, because as societal protections ramp up to match average personal acceptance level those legal implications will enter in as well. It could become very difficult not to "mis-gender" people who were changing self-designation day to day, or difficult to interpret where it all should naturally leave off, if people are adopting non-human identification along with new forms of gender identity, eg. identifying as an animal type, elf, or fairy. It could sound absurd now but new practices and social norms could need to evolve along with new forms of identification and expression.
It goes without saying that society as a whole trying to prevent anyone from entering into relationships or having children is taking a couple of extra very problematic steps.
Considering differences between two cultures and nationalities
It's very difficult to separate different levels of social changes and outcomes across two different cultures. Since I just spent two months living back in Honolulu, where I went to grad school, and since I'm in constant online contact with US culture, I can share some impressions related to how changes have real impact, related to here in Thailand, where these changes are slower to occur (accepting that these self-definition changes will also happen here, which is not necessarily a given). For the most part they really don't seem to shift culture in terms of changing how people inter-relate, to me, beyond a myriad of these isolated cases adding up to real net effect.
Within certain parts of US society, in sub-culture groups, and probably even industries, there would be real teeth to these new applied demands to observe new norms. Actors need to adopt or support certain social perspectives, for example, or company cultures can evolve towards shared perspectives, and can certainly prune out staff who don't observe those. Beyond that it's probably these sorts of hypothetical discussions, up until something like a legal right to marry completely shifts that.
Again, to be clear, Thailand is not undergoing this related social change, per my understanding. It's coming; according to my son early teenagers are so well exposed to these ideas that it's now just a matter of time until that generation carries their new self-definition range on to adult perspectives and practices. In not facing the issues yet, for these new perspectives and self-definitions not being taken up, the complications and negative outcomes also don't arise. To be clear I'm not talking about people self-identifying as gay or trans-gender; those things are normal in Thailand, and have been for some time. I'm still projecting ahead to how other related changes may cycle through to other kinds of impact, eg. enforced gender pronoun use laws.
A completely unrelated observation that I made just yesterday shows how this kind of input could be almost impossible to isolate, for some types of culture changes being gradual, or relating mainly to background conditions or "feel." I'm going to try to use this example to explain how a general culture-based "feel" varies, which is difficult to achieve.
My wife and I were in an informal market area, eating dinner in an outdoor food court sort of area, with lights hanging to outline the area, food trucks or stands serving the food, and loud music playing. In the US I had only seen food trucks mirroring this sort of environment, and that only recently, on the last stay in Hawaii (it wasn't there 15 years ago, or probably open to local licensing). I'm not claiming that Thai and developing-world culture is influencing the US; in fact the opposite. That sort of chaotic, vibrant, loud, uncontrolled environment didn't remind me of any experience I'd ever had in the US; it just felt different. I suppose it was closest to the feeling at an event, let's say at a large sports event, or state fair type environment. There is more structure and shared intentional context there, but the dynamic feel is somewhat comparable.
It couldn't be more normal in places like Bangkok sidewalks, or old-style markets. It reminded me of how one main observation from a single visit to Europe a very long time ago was that societies there were much more orderly, quieter, and more reserved. Not Eastern Europe, I don't mean; beyond the Czech Republic we only visited the Western parts. That was generally a positive thing, that public environments were much cleaner and better organized, and people were more reserved. It just felt a little odd, being accustomed to less restrictive and louder American experience.
Thailand is a couple of steps further into chaos, culturally. And that's generally a good thing too, ironically. There is essentially no crime at all, in comparison with US urban environments, and a lot changes when you cut off that mapping of rough edges and poverty linking to a lack of safety. A high degree of comfortable feeling enters in, when restrictions drop away, and noise picks up, with no real downside in terms of what might happen that's negative. Traffic risk is much worse; you have to be careful of that, and that's about it.
In the US political issue tension combines with these varying contexts and cultural shifts. Some of it all is just about perceptions and expectations, one broad group not liking another, but then real impacts do adjoin all that. Real violence comes up. Someone can get shot in a road-rage incident in Thailand too, but road rage is a much less common theme. Everyone drives so poorly all the time it's just the norm. It's rare for people to use a horn because that's regarded as poor form, but people almost crash into each other continually; that's just what driving experience is. I've only been in one accident in 15 years here though, when the mud-flap of a truck grazed our car due to passing too close when we were turning at an intersection.
Where was I going with all this? Broader cultural context is a funny thing, not something easy to isolate. Splitting out individual inputs and change effects is going to be problematic when cultural context baselines are so complex themselves. Some degree and types of chaos can seem good, and others can be very problematic. The tension and political perspective divide in the US isn't a universal theme, and legal restrictions mapping to every point of personal perspective also isn't.
Thailand is quite openly accepting of gay and transgender status, but there is no same sex marriage in Thailand. This relates to a generally conservative approach to application of laws, and the government trying to just stay out of it. I don't think there ever were legally mandated protections related to gender, race, or ethnic status either; society was given free reign to sort all that out instead. That's a trade-off; problematic special cases would occur without such protections, some people treated unfairly, while the entire range of problems from mandating equal rights also drops out.
It's probably going to seem like none of that connected, as much as I see it all as linked. What is the running thread between informal food courts set up under elevated highways tying back to societal protections and perspective of gay people? Less formal and restricted social order seems to be a normal earlier state in the development of societies. At the other extreme perhaps European societies are much more orderly, clearly role-defined, and rigid, which has to bring in positive aspects at a cost. The chaotic state of people doing whatever they want to do is nice, in terms of freedom and openness, but then negative patterns evolve that society tries to make adjustments for. Maybe gays being married is not at all a good example of this; it doesn't seem to parallel the natural need to set speed limits on roads or to control food safety through laws and inspection steps.
Conclusions
The final point, as much as there is one, is that dictating culture, perspective, and individual behavior is problematic. You can't really isolate broad cultural shifts and then identify clear outcomes that result from those. No one can say if allowing mixed race marriages proved to be a positive or negative input to US culture, in terms of some vague well-being metric. Surely providing people with reasonable rights was a positive change.
It also doesn't work well to identify clear outcomes of culture-based choice trends through stats, or by comparing one aspect of one country to another, broadly mapping different cultures. "Allowing" gay marriages probably has no more impact than allowing mixed race marriages did, but even if there was some negative outcome (eg. higher divorce rate, children experiencing problems due to drawing on more diverse role model forms) it seems in this case access to equal rights is still the primary concern.
If 25% of all Americans drop out of traditional gender based self-image roles that will have significant impact on US culture, but no one will ever really be able to separate that out as a cause of other individual effects. The US economy is already in serious long term decline, which surely no one can contest, and that cause will have greater impact on US society than almost any other individual factors. That one over-arching factor, along with issues of unequal distribution of wealth, will have more impact than people deciding that they want to switch genders, or not adopt one, or keep switching that self-definition around.
Conservatives in general would be uncomfortable with people being gay or trans. My own parents are completely liberal, except with regards to this one point. They just can't accept that as a valid norm, that men might be attracted to men, and women to women. As committed liberals maybe they can't go as far as Matt Walsh does, and say that marriage should be restricted to straight couples, although maybe they could, supporting use of the term "civil union" instead, accepting equivalent rights but not use of "their word."
My parents would be open to offering gays equivalent tax benefits, and legal protections related to divorce processing and inheritance, which shifts the issue back into purely semantic range. My parents would base that preference for word use on a perspective informed by religion, where it seems that maybe people like Matt Walsh see societies' endorsement of taking on social roles as grounded elsewhere, as supporting positive forms (what he sees as positive), leading to better outcomes (what he projects as probably better). His framing and read are problematic on every level. All the same thinking through broader related patterns and why he is uncomfortable seems interesting, to think through the next level of underlying context.
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