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It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.
The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.
I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.
Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.
I don't know that this happens without the lies, though. That NYT article said that it was "critical" to tell people these lies so that they could effect a cultural change. Again, I think you're so swimming in the result that you really just can't fathom how important it was for the culture to change. How many people felt just utterly bullied into changing their perspective, because they felt they couldn't say anything in response to, "The Science says!" They had to retreat to, "Well, I might not personally like it, but if that's who they are," or some people even said, "...if that's who god made them to be, then..."
Graduating in 2016 meant being most exposed to peak propaganda on precisely this issue. Literally 2015 was Obergefell, when the APA told SCOTUS that a bloody opinion poll settled the science on the issue. The lies were literally more like the water they were swimming through than at any other time.
Frankly, this is just reinforcing my original point. They were sooooo successful with pushing these lies to effect cultural and legal change that you can't even see how important it was. It's no wonder they think they can just boldly do it again on any issue they please. You might personally see through it the next time, but there will be a train of people who graduated in 2026 instead of 2016 or 2006 who will be right there to say, "But you just don't understand that there was a cultural change," and completely not grokking how that cultural change happened.
To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.
Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.
I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)
The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.
The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.
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I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.
It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.
I mean, you can just think whatever you want to think, and I can think otherwise. I lived through it also. I saw all the propaganda. I watched The Daily Show, uh, on the daily. You think it was "knowing people" and "personal relations", but that is still downstream of the lies. It was, "I know this person, and now that they've told me that they were born gay, that that's just who they are, and that I just have to accept who they are, I will do it." The personal relations and knowing people simply goes differently if you don't have the foundational bedrock of a lie about the person that you know.
It's really hard to extricate this lie from your mind, but it really is like saying that if people just knew more folks who steal things, they'll become more accepting of theft. I doubt that's the case. However, if you had a constant cultural threat to simply recognize that they were actually just born a kleptomaniac, that that's just the way that god made them, that there's nothing that you can do about it, they're never possibly going to change, you either just have to accept it or else you're a bigot and will be completely socially shunned, made fun of on primetime television, fired from your job, and ejected from the sphere of respectable people, then yeah, I think some number of folks would accept it. They may even construct ego-preserving myths about how they were just convinced by the science or how the whole culture became more "enlightened". But the upstream reality is that it was pure social power being exerted on the hinge of a lie.
Moreover, that lie was "critical", especially to get the political and legal power to now persecute any stragglers who want to bake cakes or make websites. Of course people are going to bend under the pressure and retcon that they were totally rational about the whole thing all along.
The “constant cultural threat” only came about once critical mass was achieved.
Consider what year it was that Obama came out in favor of gay marriage. Prop 8 in communist California was in 2008.
People are in fact born kleptomaniacs so I’m not sure what you think you’re doing here. Stealing things is bad, so that’s a problem regardless.
Mostly though, you’re not properly considering how much of the shift was old people dying.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2013/03/20/growing-support-for-gay-marriage-changed-minds-and-changing-demographics/
I’m also amused by you seeming to claim you’ve witnessed fake gays or something, because all the gays I know remain very much that way.
At any rate, those surveys support my position but that won’t be convincing to you if you believe we were all lied to and that supersedes personal experience. Do you think Dick Cheney changed his mind because of science lies and social pressure?
It’s also worth considering how much changes to trad marriage shifted and affected people’s view on the concept.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/13/opinion/coontz-same-sex-marriage/index.html
Ok, if you're going to start being ridiculous, then it's probably not of much use to continue having a more nuanced conversation about cultural context. I remember people trotting out long-term 10yr studies, wayyyy back in the old old old place, and it being hilariously bad evidence for their claim. Usually, this type of attitude cashes out in a person actually having the ideological position that it is simply definitionally impossible for someone to change sexual orientation (i.e., they've so internalized the lie that they make up whacky definitional epicycles to conform to their dogma). Like, for example, they'll claim that for even the most clear cut case of someone who claimed to be one sexuality and lived that way for a while, then claimed to be the other way, and lived that way for however long, that it's still not an example of changing; we have to call them bisexual. Let's see if we can get that type of super ridiculous stuff off the table before we see if there's any value in going any further. Would you at least admit that it is possible, and that such a person would not be a "fake gay"?
I’m saying the people I know who were gay before the tide shifted include zero examples of that phenomenon.
I’m well aware of “bisexual” being a questionable label a lot of people have adopted without it being obvious it means anything, but that phenomenon only became apparent to me, in my own life, well after the tide shifted 10+ years ago.
I can’t demonstrate any of that to you via a study, obviously.
For someone who is very concerned about dishonest science, it strikes me as strange I’m not seeing where you cite bad studies. You criticize a NYT opinion piece, but I’m not seeing any science going on here.
I’m totally willing to believe some segment of the population can be socially influenced in their sexual preferences, but it’s definitely not everyone. I, for one, am attracted to the opposite sex even though that’s deeply fucking inconvenient. If I could flip a switch I would (well, ten years ago anyway).
In my personal experience growing up in a conservative religious environment, being gay was really not fun then and still isn’t fun now. It’s not a lifestyle preference to be taken lightly.
You seem to be conflating more recent strangeness over sexual identity and especially gender labels and then retconning back to when having those identities really truly wasn’t fun.
As the NYT opinion piece says, nobody even bothers making bad science these days on this topic. There's no point anymore; no need. The Constitutional battle has been won, and it's not going back.
In any event, the example that really sticks out in my mind that I was able to find in a pretty quick search for old SSC comments was that this paper was bandied about as an on-call link for people who were anti-bigot. I summarized it thusly:
Perhaps you also missed my link somewhere to this comment, where I harken back to the APA, the bastion and gatekeeper of The Science (TM), whose primary piece of Real Science Evidence in their premier brief laying out the clear and irrefutable Science on the topic was... an opinion poll.
I mean, I don't know what to say. I point out examples of shitty science in high places meant to support a dogmatic position. I point out high profile experts openly admitting in the NYT that the "science" was "a very 1990s preoccupation" (completely minimizing its cultural relevance) that surprise, surprise, turned out to be all bupkis, and now we're admitting it (so yeah, the premise that was clearly being pushed by raw social power, well before the timeline that you think the culture just magically shifted in the absence of such lies). They also freely admit that nobody cares anymore, so there's no incentive to churn out any more bad science; they just want to memoryhole the whole thing. And somehow, your complaint is that I'm apparently not citing any more bad science? Like, I don't get what your complaint really is or how you could be satisfied by anything. It's not like you're here trying to say that there actually is all this good science, and let me show you all this good science.
Instead, I think it simply doesn't matter to you. You are not here to talk about science, anyway. You've got your personal experience, and that's all that matters to you. That's fine, but I hate to say it, sort of not really relevant?
I just think you’re getting the weights of the variables in play very wrong.
I agree that paper is dumb. 2012 is super late in the game here so it’s not very relevant anyway. I also agree the APA is often full of shit. I agree academia and medicine has a severe left wing bias. This has been true for several decades now.
But I’m not really seeing the evidence this was very load bearing for the public at large in supporting gay marriage when bigger factors exist.
Note that you haven’t addressed the cases I’ve cited (as have others I think) where we know people who had every reason to not be gay and yet they still are despite the risk/cost it was.
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