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In this episode Trent breaks down the recent discussion Matt Walsh and podcaster Joe Rogan had on the issue of marriage.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. In today’s episode, I’m going to offer my thoughts on Joe Rogan and Matt Walsh’s recent discussion of so-called gay marriage or so-called same sex marriage.
Now, I just want to be clear at the outset that I’m not trying to bash Matt Walsh or be overly critical of his engagement with Joe Rogan. I have been in the hot seat before and it’s hard to have the perfect response when someone is questioning you, especially on a topic you didn’t think you were going to necessarily talk about. At worst, I think some of Matt’s responses were just a little muddled, but overall, he was on the right track with where he was making his argument concerning marriage.
Once again, it’s easy to sit back and say, “Well, here’s what I would’ve done.” It’s a lot different when you are in the hot seat fielding these questions. One other thing you might notice ironic, and I talk about marriage a lot, you might say, “Why isn’t he wearing his wedding ring?” I lost it. I’m trying to find it. I can’t find where it is. I have my original wedding ring. I keep it in my little safe. I don’t wear it because in marriage you do a lot of growing in marriage.
Unfortunately, my growing has been more horizontal. When I got married, I was a skinny little guy and my original wedding ring, it doesn’t fit anymore. So I save it. I put it away in a safe place and I was wearing a rubber ring because I work out and things like that, but as I was working out, I did jujitsu recently and someone slammed me into the ground and my ring flew off my hand and it went across the gym and I didn’t even know where it was. So I take it off when I do go to practice and things like that and I can’t find it. So I have to order one today.
So that’s why, otherwise, obviously, believe in wearing a wedding ring, believe in the institution of marriage. So just want to have that caveat in case somebody notices it and writes in the comments or something. All right. Now, with all that being said, let’s take a look at Joe Rogan and Matt Walsh’s discussion.
Matt Walsh:
Marriage is a certain thing, which is the context for procreation for the building of the nuclear family.
Joe Rogan:
What about people that get married that don’t have kids? Are you opposed to that? What if they get married, they decide, “You know what? We don’t need kids. I’m going to get fixed. You get your tubes tied. Let’s travel the world”?
Trent Horn:
Right off the bat, it’s hard to analyze this dialogue because I don’t know what they said immediately before this. It seems like they’re discussing what is the purpose of marriage, what is the meaning of marriage. Walsh says marriage is the context for procreation, the building up of the family to which Joe Rogan says, “Yeah, but what about people who don’t have kids? Are you opposed to that?”
So you need to ask what is meant by these terms because they’re ambiguous, but before we do that, I find it helpful to have a nice compact definition of marriage. My favorite definition of marriage comes from the Catholic moral theologian, William E. May. He defines marriage as that which unites men and women to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union. All right. Let me repeat that. Marriage is that which unites men and women to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union.
Notice the definition isn’t focused on procreation per se. It’s focused on the type of union that often brings about procreation, which is the sexual union that exists between men and women. So now, we’re in a good position to answer Rogan’s follow-up question, which is this, “What about people who get married but don’t want to have kids? Are you opposed to that?”
I would say that a couple who marries and contracepts is still married. They’re just missing out on one of the unique and fundamental goods of marriage, which is having children. I can say this because we have to distinguish the essential properties of marriage from the essential elements of marriage.
So Section 1056 of the church’s code of Canon Law says, “The essential properties of marriage are unity and indissolubility, which in Christian marriage obtain a special firmness by reason of the sacrament.” This means that in order for a non-Christian marriage to be an actual marriage, it has to be the kind of thing where a man and woman are united to each other. This is a biological impossibility for same sex couples. Just because you stick one body part inside of another body part, that doesn’t mean you are united. That union only happens in the marital act because the two people create a hole ordered to an end greater than themselves, even if they don’t reach that end of procreation.
It’s the same reason that nine guys at the batting cages are not a baseball team. Even though they do something you see in baseball, hitting the balls, but nine guys playing games, they are a baseball team even if they lose every single game. They’re a team because they’re ordered towards that end. That’s what makes them a team even if the end is never achieved. This is true of marriage because a married couple have pledged themselves to one another. They’re ordered towards procreative end even if they never achieve that end. So they are still married.
The second Vatican council uses beautiful language to describe an essential element of marriage in this way. It says, “As a mutual gift of two persons, this intimate union and the good of the children impose total fidelity on the spouses and argue for an unbreakable oneness between them.” Also notice that the code of Canon Law says the essential properties of marriage are unity and indissolubility, which in Christian marriage obtain a special firmness by reason of the sacrament.
This means that you can have these things among non-Christians and non-Christians can use reason to see that marriage is a natural reality ordered towards certain ends, one of them being the procreation of children. Even if you don’t end up having children, marriage involves the monogamous union of a man and woman engaging in the act that is designed to create children, which is something that cannot happen with the same sex couple.
Now, in Catholic marriages, you make certain vows, including vows to be open to receiving children. If someone doesn’t mean those vows, they’re just going through the motions that they promised, then that can be grounds for an annulment. So for example, if you vowed to be sexually faithful, but when you were making the vow, you were planning on committing adultery throughout your entire marriage, your marriage wouldn’t be valid. Likewise, if you said you’d be open to children, but you planned on never having kids under any circumstance, then the marriage wouldn’t be valid, but from a purely natural law perspective, as long as a couple has unity and ideal, indissolubility, they promise, at least, till death do us part, then they have a good and natural marriage, even if they don’t plan to have children.
Now, back to Rogan, he asks, “What about people who get married but plan to be childless?” Though I would say they’re married, but they’re missing out on an essential element of marriage. So this would be wrong, but they’re still married, and it isn’t so wrong that it needs to be made illegal. Having a man and a woman in a monogamous, socially recognized relationship is good for society even if they don’t plan on having children. Plus, contraception isn’t 100% foolproof. They could still end up getting pregnant even if they don’t plan to get pregnant, and if they do get pregnant, well, it’s good that they’re married.
So to make an analogy for Rogan, I’d ask him, does he oppose people getting married even though they aren’t in love? Here’s a clip of him from a different episode where he actually, through this, he questions the entire institution of marriage.
Joe Rogan:
Some people just don’t, they’re not supposed to be together, but they think they should be with somebody. So they find somebody and they talk that someone into doing something (beep) insane like signing a legal contract that says, “We’re going to be together forever and ever till death.” It’s also a weird cultural tradition, right? It’s this weird thing that we have this law, we bring the law involved into relationships. It’s very strange like legal contracts and some of them are (beep) just gelatinous looking, job of the hut looking man and a beautiful hot young wife because the guy’s got (beep) cajillions. That’s a normal thing. It’s a preposterous union in the first place.
Trent Horn:
So let’s consider the case of a loveless marriage, like one that’s contracted just for money and physical intimacy or as a poet once said, “I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t associating herself with low income gentlemen.” So in this case, Rogan clearly expresses moral disapproval of this behavior, even if he doesn’t intend to, but I’m sure he’d legally tolerate this behavior. He’s not going to try to outlaw it. Rogan’s metric for the law is very libertarian. Do whatever you want as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, but some consensual activities make society a worse place and they should be illegal.
For example, it’s illegal to sell your organs, to take money in exchange for placing a child for adoption or making money through sex because these actions lead to exploitation. They degrade other people. So someone like Matt Walsh can say, and I’m not judging Matt for not saying this because it’s easy to say anything after the fact. Matt could say, “Look, you think loveless marriages are not as good as loving marriages because they lack an important part of marriage, genuine affection.”
Well, I can just say the same thing about childless marriages. They’re not as good as marriages, purposely, childless marriages. They’re not as good as marriages that at least try and seek children even if that doesn’t happen through no fault of the spouses because of something like infertility. I mean, in some marriages, you won’t have children or you won’t have love, and it’s not anybody’s fault.
For example, if your spouse ends up in a coma, they don’t love you during that period, but you’re still married. After all, you promise to be together in sickness and in health till death do you part. The same is true if you’re infertile. You are still married, but the marriage tragically lacks something it is naturally ordered towards. So we’d be on the same page. Marriage is good, loving marriage is better, and marriage where the love between the spouses is open to bringing a new human being into existence is even better than that, and we should promote that kind of marriage because it’s literally the foundation of society. Society does not make marriage. Marriage makes society, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Matt Walsh:
Well, what do you mean am I opposed to it? I mean, I think that every married couple should be open to life.
Joe Rogan:
What if they don’t want to? Are you opposed to them being married? If marriage is only for procreation and to bond a family together, what about people that are deeply in love that never want to have children?
Matt Walsh:
It’s not only procreation, but that is one of the fundamental, definitional aspects of it. Of course, there’s more to marriage just than that.
Trent Horn:
So here we need to be clear on what Rogan means by opposed to it. I am morally opposed to childless marriages just as I’m morally opposed to loveless marriages. You can have a valid marriage where each person promises to be faithful and obey the bare minimum of what makes marriage marriage, but they also have no intention of ever having genuine affection for the other person in the marriage.
Now, by loveless marriage, I’m not saying you have to have that genuine affection right at the very beginning. There are arranged marriages that start off without a lot of affection, but the partners are at least open to affection between each other and it grows over time. I’m talking about the gross gold digger marriages, ones that are permanently opposed to genuine affection from the very beginning and you’re just using the institution of marriage, but it should still be legal because it falls under the bare minimum of what marriage is.
Remember the definition, that which unites a man and woman to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union. If we allow something else to be called marriage that isn’t, like so-called same-sex marriage, then we lose the justification for marriage having essential elements like unity and permanence in the first place.
Joe Rogan:
What about people that are infertile? They fall in love and they realize that they can’t have babies and they don’t really necessarily want to adopt. Is that okay for them to be married? Because then by definition, marriage falls into a completely different thing because then it’s a bond of love, it’s a union of love.
Matt Walsh:
Sure. I mean that doesn’t change the nature of marriage, though. It’s a little bit like I say what’s the definition of a woman. Well, a woman is someone who by her nature can conceive children in her woman bear children, and then the response is always, “What about women who are infertile? Does that destroy your definition of woman?” It doesn’t because it’s still a woman’s nature to bear children. Not every woman will, and there will be disease and infertility and old age and all these things that will preclude that, but it’s still of her nature to do so. I would say the same thing for marriage. I mean, it is natural in a marriage for procreation to occur. It’s not always going to happen in reality, though, but that’s still one of the natural functions of marriage.
Trent Horn:
This is a good response. Just as a woman is any human being ordered towards gestating children even if she can’t gestate children because of a natural or self-inflicted injury to her reproductive organs, marriage is that which unites men and women to one another and to any children that may come from their union even if they never end up having children. This is true even if the couple can no longer have sex, such as if one or both partners becomes impotent. As long as they came together at least once, then they’re married because they became one flesh. They achieved that which united the man and woman, the marital act, but within the legal recognition of marriage or the legal and social recognition.
That’s why impotence is an impediment to marriage. If you get married and it turns out your partner will never be able to have sex during the marriage, the marriage would be declared null because you can never become one flesh. Even if you are able to have sex, but for some reason you don’t end up having sex, then the church teaches the marriage can be dissolved because, once again, you have not become one flesh yet through the marital act.
Civil law even allows for annulments for similar reasons. If marriage involves the state recognizing the one flesh union that exists between a man and woman, and if that union is impossible throughout the entire marriage, there’s permanent impotence throughout the entire marriage where they never become one flesh, then you declare the marriage null or grant an annulment. They don’t need a divorce because they were never married. They never became one flesh, but if you legally redefine marriage to accommodate same sex couples, then you lose the rational basis for rules like this.
If a couple says, “Well, we’re never going to be able to engage in vaginal intercourse and we’ve never had vaginal intercourse, so we would like our marriage to be annulled.” It’s an essential element. The state has to say, “Sorry, lesbians and gay couples can’t ever engage in vaginal intercourse with each other, but they’re still legally married so you have to be too,” or you have to say the rules for marriage just don’t apply to same sex couples.
Many lawyers and legal scholars say that annulments for impotence or non-consummation of the marriage, they only apply to opposite sex couples, not to same sex couples, but if the rules related to marriage can’t be applied to your relationship, then maybe your relationship is not a marriage.
Finally, someone like Joe Rogan might say, “Just let anybody get out of a marriage for any reason, whatsoever. Who cares?” If you do that, marriage stops being marriage. Till death do us part is just a lie. It just becomes dating with a fancy certificate and a bunch of legal fees.
Matt Walsh:
Married couples who can’t conceive children, there are other ways to be parents like adoption, for example.
Joe Rogan:
If they want to, but if people want to be married and don’t want to ever have children, are you opposed to them being married?
Matt Walsh:
Well, I wouldn’t advocate a law that would prevent it.
Joe Rogan:
Would it change the definition of what their marriage is to you because they don’t want to have a family, they just want to have a loving bond?
Matt Walsh:
I think this will be a couple that is rejecting one of the fundamental aspects of marriage that they should be open to life. I would hope that in the future they would be, but-
Joe Rogan:
Isn’t that just a personal choice? I mean, you can have a very fulfilling life if you just follow your pursuits and your dreams and your interests and you find someone that shares those interests with you and you share time together that’s very fulfilling and loving.
Trent Horn:
So in response, I would ask Rogan, should it be legal for people to lead unfulfilling lives in general? “Sure,” he’d say. Some people waste their lives watching Netflix and being on Facebook. It’s legal, but you can criticize people for wasting the gift of their life and health. Likewise, you can say it should be legal to live an unfulfilled marital life by focusing solely on each other and purposely excluding children without any just cause.
Of course, Rogan thinks it is fulfilling to pursue other things besides the procreative end of marriage, but none of this changes the definition of marriage, that which unites men and women to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union. Even if a married man and woman never have children, society benefits from them being married. For example, it provides a publicly known means to keep the two of them from running around and having sex with other people and causing negative social effects like children being born out of wedlock. I know this still happens through things like affairs, but at least provides one visible safeguard to keep it from happening as often.
Also, the example, the social example of them being faithful and monogamous to each other provides an educational witness to other people in society to show that as a society we want to reserve sex in the marital context even if they don’t end up having children. Granted, a lot of people don’t believe this today, but it’s interesting that most people recognize that marriage is for sex. That’s why they freak out when you suggest that family members should be allowed to marry each other.
I have to specify when I offer that proposal, I mean it platonically. Let’s say two elderly sisters just want to share health benefits and a house together. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do that and get married? Our modern culture may think sex has nothing to do with marriage, but it still believes marriage has something to do with sex, and that only makes sense if marriage is not about personal fulfillment or happiness because you can have those things without sex, but if marriage is just that which unites men and women to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union, then a conjugal definition is just essential to what marriage is.
Matt Walsh:
So it’s a personal choice in that I’m not advocating for a law that says that if you’re married you have to have X number of kids.
Joe Rogan:
Then why you oppose to two gay people doing that?
Trent Horn:
We have to make sure to not allow the other side of these debates to control the use of language. That’s why I always try to say in this context so-called gay marriage or so-called same sex marriage. Those terms are like a married bachelor. They’re a contradiction because, remember, what is marriage? It’s essentially about men, women, and children proceeding from their union. I’m not against gay people getting married in the legal sense. If a person who identifies as gay wants to marry a person of the opposite sex and promises to be faithful to them, that can be legal, though it’s probably not a great idea, but there’s no such thing as gay marriage because marriage, by its definition, is what unites men and women to each other and to any children that may proceed from their union.
A married couple that is purposefully childless or a married couple that are unintentionally childless, like their infertility, are still married. They have formed their marriage through a legal recognition, through public recognition, and a one flesh union, but a same sex couple cannot do that because the sexual behavior they engage in is not a union of any kind. There’s no possibility of them becoming one flesh. An infertile couple becomes one flesh, they’re just not able to achieve the end of marriage, the procreative end, but they’re at least engaging in the activity ordered towards that end. The same sex couple, they simply aren’t.
Matt Walsh:
Well, because, again, it’s not about choice. It’s about what this institution, marriage is an institution, and what is it and what purpose does it serve. I do not agree with tearing down or changing this definition, especially because the people who have changed the definition haven’t come up with a new one. So they say, “Well, that’s not what marriage is.” So for thousands of years we said marriage is the procreative union, and then we had the other side came along and said, “Well, it’s not that.” Okay. Well, then what is it exactly?
I know you said, “Well, it’s people who love each other, two people who love each other,” but then, why two people? Why do they have to love each other? All these kinds of questions. You get into, “What if they’re in the same family? What if brothers and sisters want to marry?” I know every time that comes up, the advocates for gay marriage will say, “Well, that’s a slippery slope argument. That’s a fallacious,” but it’s actually not. It’s like we’re trying to get to what do you even think this institution is now since you’ve rejected out what we were saying it was. I’ve never found a compelling definition. Any definition offered, it’s like, “Well, what’s even the point then? Why do we even need this now?”
Trent Horn:
Walsh is on the right track here. I just would’ve offered a more solidified preface to his argument. The reason marriage should not have been legally redefined to accommodate same-sex couples is that if you do that, you lose the rational basis for the norms associated with marriage. These include government recognizing and regulating marriage, that marriage is ideally lifelong, that it’s sexual in nature, and that it’s a monogamous relationship involving only two people. Two people get married and it’s not okay to have sex with people who aren’t your spouse.
Now, Walsh is correct in demanding a definition of what this new idea of marriage is because if marriage is just about affirming adult behavior, then why should we expect adults to be in lifelong relationships if they don’t want to be? Why promise till death do us part instead of till lack of love does us part? Why have the standard at all? Why does marriage have to be sexual or monogamous or only involve two people?
Speaker 5:
Nobody knows how to plan a polyamorous wedding, seriously.
Speaker 6:
We’re here to celebrate the love of summer, Jimmy and Chacha.
Speaker 7:
Oh, my gosh! Okay. Let’s do this. Okay. So this is my husband and this is my fiance.
Speaker 8:
Wow.
Speaker 7:
Can’t get legally married in our state. There are certain states in America that do allow it and it is a thought, but right now, we’re just going to celebrate our love in front of our friends and family.
Trent Horn:
Why do we need the government regulating our private relationships at all? Having a friend is a fulfilling thing in life, and it’d be great if we could make promises to each other to keep our friends around because it stinks to lose a friend, but it’s not the government’s role to regulate how our friendships start and end.
Joe Rogan:
It’s also a weird cultural tradition, right? It’s this weird thing that we have this law. We bring the law involved into relationships and it’s-
Trent Horn:
Matt basically made these points, but it was just a tad rushed and it would’ve been more helpful to put them in a systematic framework, but this is the approach we need to take. When somebody asks us, “Why are you against gay marriage or same-sex marriage?” or now they would say marriage equality, what we should say is, “I believe that legally redefining marriage will cause us to give up the rational basis for the essential elements of what make marriage marriage, government recognition, unity, indissolubility. Once you redefine it, you lose the basis for that. It becomes totally arbitrary.”
Joe Rogan:
I just don’t see how a gay marriage in any way damages a straight marriage. I don’t see it at all. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It just seems to me that people want to be … Look, if you wanted to look at logic, especially in our modern society, which is pretty **** when it comes to relationships, it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of all marriages in a divorce anyway. They don’t make it. I don’t know. If anything would damage marriage and damage the institution of marriage, it’s the option of divorce. I don’t think gay people and gay people getting married in any way, shape or form changes a bond that you have with your wife. It’s just called marriage. It’s a human invented thing. If we decide that gay people can get married too, I just don’t see how it damages anything. I don’t think it tears down the definition of marriage in any way. It just opens up the possibility that people who are gay won’t be discriminated against.
Trent Horn:
What’s funny is that Rogan actually brings up the very example that I would cite, no fault divorce. When no fault divorce was introduced in 1969, which allowed divorce for basically any reason or no reason at all, people were saying in the ’70s and the ’80s, “How does Frank and Betty getting a divorce affect your marriage? Why do you care as long as they get to be happy?” The answer is that decades later, we know it affects our marriages because widespread acceptance of divorce weakens all marriages. It removes one of the essential properties of marriage and it causes us to wonder, “Well, why do we even need the institution of marriage at all?”
The research has bared this out. According to an article at the Pew Research Center, quote, “Rose McDermott of Brown University analyzed three decades of data on marriage, divorce, and remarriage collected from thousands of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were 75% more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced, and 33% more likely to end their marriage if a friend of a friend is divorced.”
When other people treat marriage as something that’s just an accessory to their quest for personal fulfillment, then marriage loses its force as a bond that is enforced upon people through social and legal conventions. For example, here’s a chart showing marriage rates. In the United States. We see marriage being pretty stable with a huge baby boom after World War II and a corresponding dip in the ’50s and early ’60s, but starting in the late ’70s, marriage starts a downward trend, part of it motivated by contraception and divorce, undermining the rational basis for marriage.
Marriage begins to flat line in 2009, but then it craters in the later 2010s right after the Supreme Court upheld so-called same sex marriage in the case Obergefell versus Hodges. Now, I’m not saying the decline after 2015 was solely or directly caused by the Supreme Court’s decision on so-called same sex marriage. These social issues have a lot of factors, but it’s worth looking into when it comes to how our understanding of marriage has changed over time.
So my answer to Rogan would be redefining marriage to remove its essential permanence or it’s essential bonding of a man and woman opens the door to making marriage an irrelevant institution. G. K. Chesterton once said, “The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason, they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason,” to which I would add frivolous, unmarried life so that not only they will feel at all the easier to be united for no reason, they will also feel no reason to be united in the first place.
Matt Walsh:
Yeah, I don’t think that a gay couple existing directly impacts … There’s a gay couple wherever, and I’m with my wife in our house. Obviously, there’s not, but I’m not talking about on the individual level, I’m talking about on the societal level. I would agree that divorce, especially this no fault divorce, rampant divorce, I don’t think it’s as high as 50%. I know that’s often quoted. I’m not sure where that comes from, but it is high. It’s too high.
Joe Rogan:
Chris Rock has a great joke about that. He said those are just the people with the courage to get out. It’s like, how many coward stay?
Matt Walsh:
It’s also true that the advocates for what we call now traditional marriage, which I just call marriage, but the advocates for traditional marriage put themselves at a disadvantage by allowing, especially in the churches, allowing this rampant divorce to occur. Then you’ve already given up on some … Marriage is supposed to be monogamous and permanent, as well as procreative. Well, you’ve given up monogamy and permanence, and so now that’s two of the three legs gone, and so now this assault was waged on the procreative part of it and it was just difficult to withstand it because the institution had already been weakened. So I agree with you there, but my answer to that is to try to reinforce what marriage is, not to just give up on it.
Trent Horn:
I agree, and I think that if you’re going to be consistent when it comes to opposing redefining marriage to accommodate same sex couples, then you need to do the same thing with divorce. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to support laws banning divorce right now because when it comes to politics, some things are feasible and other things are not feasible, but you can support things like covenant marriages that make divorce harder to obtain if people want to choose them or laws to reform divorce so it’s done as a last resort in order to serve the interests of children and their safety and not primarily to serve the interests of adults who want things like personal fulfillment. If you embrace a relational view of marriage, which says marriage is just a way for the state to make people feel happy in their personal relationships, then you lose any justification for the state to try and intervene and keep marriages from ending.
Matt Walsh:
You’re left with this question of, if marriage is not what I’m saying it is, then why do we even need it? I mean, you’re saying it’s a manmade institution.
Joe Rogan:
Yes.
Matt Walsh:
The way that you’re presenting it, also, it’s a totally meaningless institutions.
Joe Rogan:
No.
Matt Walsh:
They don’t need it at all.
Joe Rogan:
No, it’s not meaningless because it means something to the people that get married.
Matt Walsh:
So it’s just a subjective, symbolic thing. I mean, what?
Joe Rogan:
Yeah. It’s what it is. Look, there’s a massive responsibility when you’re married and when you have children to keep your family together and keep everybody happy and healthy and there’s great reward to that, but it doesn’t always work out. People change. People (beep) up. It doesn’t always work. So I don’t think it should be outlawed because 50% of the people fall apart.
Trent Horn:
First, the 50% of couples get divorce statistic, that’s a myth, and we’ve known that for decades. It comes from projections that were made back in the 1980s, which were shown to be wrong. One article puts it this way, an equally reasonable and correct way to deal with the data recorded for divorce and marriage is cited in an introductory family text authored by Dickinson and Leming, who state, quote, “In 1988, there were approximately 2.4 million marriages and 1.2 million divorces. Americans were almost twice as likely to marry as to divorce in this year. Does this mean that one half of all marriages end in divorce?
While many have assumed that these figures indicate that 50% of all marriages end in divorce, we know that most of the divorces in 1988 involved marriages contracted in prior years. Consequently, based upon this information, it is not accurate to say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce.”
Just because in one year, twice as many people got married is divorced, it doesn’t mean half of those new marriages will end in divorce. The rate right now for divorce is as low as 20% or to put it in another way, 80% of marriages succeed if you have healthy marriage habits and foundations.
Number two, Rogan is talking out of both sides of his mouth here. He’s saying marriage is this serious thing that’s important, but also, it can be whatever you want it to be for whoever gets married. Well, then what about people who get married and treat it frivolously? If it’s wrong for them to do that, then marriage has an objective meaning people can distort. Otherwise, if you say the meaning of marriage is whatever people think its meaning is, well, like Matt said, that’s like saying a woman is whoever says she is a woman. You’ve robbed the terms woman in marriage of any meaning, and in consequence of that, taken away their objective importance in society.
Matt Walsh is absolutely right to call Joe Rogan out on this. If marriage has no objective meaning, then why is the state even involved in regulating it in the first place? If marriage just is for uniting men and women to one another and to any children that may proceed from their union, then the state does have an interest in legally recording and enforcing promises of lifelong sexual monogamy when it usually doesn’t have an interest or even a right to record and regulate things about our private relationships.
Joe Rogan:
Just like I don’t think it has any effect whatsoever on a straight couple, if a gay couple decides that they want to make it official, and that’s what it is to them. It gives them a feeling that they’re accepted and appreciated and that they’re not discriminated against because they happen to be homosexual.
Matt Walsh:
So, well, what you’re articulating to me is the damage that’s done by gay marriage to the institution of marriage.
Joe Rogan:
How is that in any way damage straight people?
Matt Walsh:
Because we are making the institution meaningless.
Joe Rogan:
It’s not meaningless. It’s very meaningful to the people that have it.
Matt Walsh:
Subjective, symbolic, and it’s about your own personal feelings.
Joe Rogan:
Isn’t it, though?
Trent Horn:
Rogan is contradicting himself here because he says marriage has no objective purpose, but then he turns around and says marriage does have an objective purpose. Marriage exists to make people in their private relationships feel like they’re important at a social level, but by that logic, Rogan can’t object to transgender athletes in segregated sports, something he’s questioned in the past because the same reasons are used to defend that behavior. Don’t discriminate and let them compete because it makes them feel accepted, but if those reasons don’t justify redefining a basic feature of human nature like womanhood because doing so irreparably harm society, then redefining marriage to accommodate the feelings of same sex couples does not justify the harm that comes from making marriage subjective and ultimately meaningless, as Walsh says.
Rogan is also saying, “Well, why do you need a special thing in the law for male-female unions when many couples choose to not have children?” When it comes to statistics on that matter, it’s somewhere between nine and 25 percent of couples choose to not have children. Now, this is hard to measure because you can have couples that say they never want to have kids and then they end up having kids later anyways, either by choice or unintentionally, but the majority of marriages do end up producing children. Even the ones that don’t, the fact of the matter is that they’re engaging in an activity that is ordered towards creating helpless human beings, being engaged in a marital act.
So the state has an interest in moving people to reserve that activity, the marital act, for marriage. For example, numerous studies have shown that adults who follow the success sequence are far less likely to end up in poverty. This is the sequence. It’s just three steps. Number one, finish high school. Number two, get a full-time job once you finish high school, and number three, get married before you have children.
According to Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox in their book Millennial Success Sequence, quote, “97% of millennials who follow what has been called the success sequence, that is who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order, are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years, ages 28 to 34.”
So the state has an interest in promoting an institution like marriage for sexual union between men and women, as long as that institution has objective elements to it like unity, permanence, monogamy, and indissolubility, but it does not have any similar interest in regulating other private relationships, especially relationships that are not ordered towards that procreative end, such as those involving same sex couples.
Matt Walsh:
Well, no, I would say that it’s not.
Joe Rogan:
Well, if it’s not subjective and it’s not symbolic, then-
Matt Walsh:
It codifies and protects and gives a name to a thing that actually exists, which are man-woman couples, creating people, creating babies.
Joe Rogan:
Not always.
Trent Horn:
I would just say the exception does not disprove the rule. Blind people are legally allowed to go to museums, but we’re not going to redefine what art is just to accommodate people’s sensibilities.
Matt Walsh:
That’s still the nature of the union.
Joe Rogan:
But what are the percentage of people today that are married that don’t have children? I bet it’s pretty high amongst heterosexuals.
Matt Walsh:
Probably.
Joe Rogan:
Is there something wrong with that?
Matt Walsh:
I think there is something wrong with that. I think there is something wrong with getting married and saying, “Oh, we’re not going to have any kids at all.”
Joe Rogan:
Why is there something wrong with that? It’s someone’s personal choice. Why is it wrong that two people are like, “I am deeply committed to work and I don’t want to sacrifice any of my career and I don’t want to ruin a kid because I’m constantly at the office, but that’s where I get deep satisfaction and that’s what I’m focused on,” and the woman says, “That’s great because I don’t want children either. I really am attached to my interest and my career and what I like to do”? That’s not damaging your relationship with your wife and your family. I certainly don’t think of it as a threat to my marriage or my family.
Trent Horn:
Rogan basically treats marriage as something that exists to help people get what they want in life, but traditionally, the purpose of marriage is not about getting what the individual wants, it’s providing stability in society by restricting what an individual might want to do, such as impregnating many people or causing children to come into existence and then abandoning them.
Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent to the Obergefell decision, the Supreme Court case that created the right to so-called same sex marriage, he critiqued when the court said, “The nature of marriage is that through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” Scalia wrote, “Really? Whoever thought that intimacy and spirituality, whatever that means, were freedoms? If intimacy is, one would think freedom of intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”
So Rogan brings up the example of a couple that wants to get married, but they also want to work all the time in order to serve their community and they don’t have time for kids. Okay. Then why get married at all if you absolutely want to avoid one of the fundamental goods of marriage? Just work, just live together, just sign contracts saying you own stuff together, but why do you need to be married? Why is it anyone else’s business how two adults carry on their private relationship with one another?
Let me give an example. Imagine someone says, “I find a lot of fulfillment in having sex with lots of different people. So I want to get married, but I don’t want to do the monogamy part.” Somebody like Joe Rogan might say, “If promiscuity is fulfilling to them, why would you say it’s wrong for them to get married just because they won’t stay monogamous?” The answer is that their promiscuous behavior is the opposite of what marriage is for. So it doesn’t make sense to get married.
Maybe they want to get married because even though they’re promiscuous, they want at least one person in life to promise to take care of them as they get older, while they’re free to have sex with lots of other people. “So what if it’s a personal choice?” as Rogan says. Just because something is a personal choice doesn’t mean that it’s above scrutiny, but once again, we’re conflating moral opposition with legal opposition.
As Matt points out, nobody is trying to pass a law saying that married couples must have children, but we are against having the law changed to say that the concept of married couples has nothing to do with children or that children are an accessory to marriage. A childless married couple are still carrying out the essential elements of marriage and society has an interest in their union, but redefining marriage doesn’t make sense in that context.
In fact, throughout human history, the law gave husbands a presumption of paternity. If their wives gave birth, the husband is presumed to be the father unless the husband challenged that paternity. This is important for making sure that children are born into stable unions, but now in redefining marriage, the presumption of paternity is destroyed because take a lesbian couple, for example. If one woman in that relationship gives birth, 100% of the time, that woman’s spouse is not the biological parent to the other child. Once again, rules related to marriage like the presumption of paternity or annulments for non-consummation, they don’t apply to same sex couples, but if the rules for marriage that have existed for thousands of years don’t apply to your relationship, then that’s good reason to think your relationship is not actually a marriage.
Rogan also says that so-called same sex marriages, they don’t damage opposite sex marriages, so what’s the big deal, but it does if this pattern of redefining marriage changes our understanding of the institution. If marriage is totally subjective, then the vows Laura and I made, well, they’re just personal preferences. The vows to be true to each other until death threw us apart, they’re just personal preferences. We can change them whenever we feel like it because they don’t have an objective meaning. They aren’t unchanging norms set by the community as a whole to make sure every marriage ideally retains its unity and permanence.
The goal of marriage turns into the equivalent of a New Year’s resolution that we might set, but nobody feels the need to hold us to once we get tired of it in March. Instead, we end up humoring people who just find marriage to be an accessory to their personal fulfillment, and we change marriage so much, it logically follows we have to allow for things like polyamory, open marriages, and even things like self-marriages.
Speaker 9:
The 36-year old tying the knot was all about making a formal commitment to the love of her life, herself.
Erica:
Yeah, I’ve been told I’m a great catch and today, I’m catching myself.
Speaker 9:
Erica is far from alone. She joins a small yet growing number of women from around the world.
Speaker 11:
So when you did get married, you weren’t actually saying, “I’m just going to be happy with myself forever.”
Erica:
Lock myself in the cave, never touch anyone.
Speaker 13:
You don’t have to get divorced from yourself if you marry someone else.
Erica:
Absolutely not. Marrying yourself is a long life commitment to be responsible for your own happiness. So divorce is not an option.
Speaker 13:
Of course.
Speaker 11:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Once again, when you use a relational definition of marriage, you lose any justification for social norms related to marriage like government recognition and communal support of a lifelong sexually monogamous bond. You end up peeling away the norms until marriage becomes anything to anyone, which makes it nothing for everybody, but a conjugal view of marriage is the only way to objectively justify these norms, to keep them from being simply arbitrary, even though they show marriage as a term cannot be applied to every romantic relationship.
Matt Walsh:
It is a personal choice.
Joe Rogan:
Right, but shouldn’t people be allowed to make those personal choices? Isn’t that a fundamental aspect of what it means to be American to have that freedom?
Matt Walsh:
Well, yeah, but right now, we’re not talking about what people are allowed to do. I’m not saying that-
Joe Rogan:
Well, we’re talking about marriage, gay marriage.
Trent Horn:
Once again, we have to make a distinction between real marriages that lack virtue like purposely loveless or purposely childless marriages and relationships that claim to be marriage but are not marriage like so-called gay marriage. We have to control the language. Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to get our ideas across.
Matt Walsh:
We were just discussing straight couples who choose not to have kids.
Joe Rogan:
Straight couples, that’s also a personal freedom issue, isn’t it?
Matt Walsh:
Yeah, and I’m not saying that straight couples should be legally required to have kids, but if you’re asking me, do I think it’s the right choice to just get married and choose not to have kids ever? I do not think that that’s the right choice. It’s their choice, but people can make choices that are wrong, and you can disagree.
Joe Rogan:
How is it wrong if they have a fulfilling and wonderful life together with that choice? If their thing is that they just want to have a bond between the two of them to just take it to the next level, let everybody know, “We are married. If I die, my money’s going to go to Helen, and if Helen dies, I’m going to mourn her because she was my wife and now I’ll be a widower.” To some people, that distinction gives them peace and security and makes them feel better about the relationship that they’re both so committed that they’ve legally signed documents that say that they’re bound by law and under the eyes of God or whatever you believe in.
Trent Horn:
Notice that Rogan is in a dilemma. He’s saying a choice is not wrong if it’s personally fulfilling, but then what determines if something is personally fulfilling? If it’s the couple themselves, then why can’t the gold diggers have personally fulfilling marriages? They are married. If Uncle Moneybags dies, his money goes to Betty Bossoms. If the couple determines it, what makes something fulfilling, Rogan has to give up his criticism of these relationships. Now, in some cases he’ll say, “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with gold digger marriages,” but he clearly implies that some marriages are better than others and these are not the better marriages.
Joe Rogan:
I’m not saying it’s not an interesting deal that some people make. The guy who married Anna Nicole Smith, remember I used to have that bit about that guy, that was the same thing. It was like nothing’s wrong with it, everybody knows what it is, but you can’t … That’s not the same. All marriages is not the same. So people that were upset about gay marriage, just gay people that legitimately love each other and they want to get married, you should be upset at this other (beep).
Trent Horn:
If the couple themselves don’t determine what is and isn’t a fulfilling relationship, then Rogan is using a standard beyond the personal preferences of the couple to determine what the goals of marriage should be and whether the couple is in a good marriage or not.
Finally, what’s ironic, and I don’t know if Rogan has changed his views on this, but he’s always been pessimistic about marriage, and that doesn’t really come across in this clip. He has often said that getting married is a bad idea, and he said that after he got married. In an interview with the Palm Beach Post shortly after Rogan got married, he said that he basically had to get married, quote, “I had to tie the knot, not really had to, but she made a baby. It’s like, ‘God, all right. I’ll sign a silly legal contract.’ What she did was way more of a commitment,” Rogan said.
An article in Parade Magazine goes on to say of Rogan, “He had long said he would never get married.” As recently as a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, continued claiming he was still against it. “Marriage is dumb,” he told the outlet. So what’s the secret to making his own marriage work? Explain Rogan, “She lets me do whatever I do. That’s how we get along well.”
Matt Walsh:
They’re able to make that choice, but I think you’re still rejecting one of the purposes of marriage, and in this scenario that you just outlined, you’re also deciding to live a really self-centered life. You’re saying-
Joe Rogan:
Well, what if you’re not? What if your work is very charitable? What if it benefits humanity in a deep way? What if you spend a lot of time doing healthcare work and social work, and you’re deeply committed to your community? It’s not selfish at all. You’re just dedicating your time to something other than raising new human beings. You’re dedicating your life to enhancing other human beings that are around you.
Trent Horn:
If you want to dedicate your life to enhancing the lives of other human beings while choosing to not have children, then why would you enter into the one relationship that is designed to create children? “Well, we want sex and we want intimacy, and we want care taking, but we don’t want children, so we just use contraception.” That might work sometimes, but as scientist Ian Malcolm says, “Life finds a way,” and it would be tragic for a child to come into existence in the marital act knowing his parents despise his existence and see him as a threat to their love rather than as the fruit of their love, which is why it’s not surprising in these kinds of situations when the child does come into existence, he tragically doesn’t stay in existence for very long.
Matt Walsh:
That’s hypothetical.
Joe Rogan:
It is hypothetical, so as yours, right?
Matt Walsh:
Yeah, but I think most of the people that choose, “We’re not going to have kids,” and those rates are declining, and the age when people first have kids is also going up and all that. Most of the people that are making these choices, I don’t think it’s because they’re involved in charity work. I do think that it is more the scenario you outlined the first time around, which is just like, “Well, this is what I’m doing. I have my job. I don’t want to give it up.”
Joe Rogan:
Yeah, but don’t you think that people should have the freedom to live their life in that way? I think human beings very widely in a huge way, and I think there’s some human beings that find a very fulfilling life just reading books and traveling and experiencing different things and seeing art and doing whatever the **** they want to do and they don’t necessarily have to have kids to live a fulfilling life that way. If they choose to do that with someone who they have a loving bond with and who they get married to, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they don’t want to have kids.
Trent Horn:
Once again, we’re back to the distinction between moral opposition to deliberately child-free lives and legally defining marriage as having something to do with the one union that brings children into existence. You can have legal marriage for child-free couples and still say they’re missing the point of marriage, just as you can have legal marriage for love-free couples who marry for pragmatic reasons, even though they’re missing the point of marriage.
If you care about civil liberties like Rogan, then why stop at people who are sexually attracted to each other? Why can’t anyone like a platonic relationship between elderly sisters get the same legal benefits of marriage? If marriage is more than about legal benefits, if it’s also about affirming adult sexual relationships, then why is that any of the state’s business? I thought according to secular liberalism, it was only Christians who want to snoop in everyone’s bedrooms and judge what they’re doing, but now it seems like everybody wants their particular sexual desires and behaviors to be validated by everybody else, and if we don’t validate and celebrate it, then we are bigots, which is absurd.
In any case, I hope this is helpful for you guys, and if you want a really good treatment of this topic, then I recommend Ryan Anderson’s book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. I honestly doubt we will turn back the needle on marriage anytime soon, but at the very least, we can reasonably explain what we believe about marriage, and we should live out our own marriages and find their objective fulfillment in lifelong monogamy that is open to life. With that said, I bid you adieu, and yeah, I just hope you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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