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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.
What kind of evidence would you accept? If it being the primary argument in essentially all the at-the-time documents (like briefs to the Supreme Court) and the NYT saying that it was "critical" for precisely that isn't good enough, what kind of evidence is? And what possible evidence could you bring that is up to this incredible standard in order to support a different conclusion?
I don't see how this is relevant to anything. People do all sorts of stuff even when I think they have every reason to do otherwise. They have different worldviews; simple as. I spoke here before about a person I met who was utterly convinced that it was his duty to sell marijuana, even though he had every reason not to, knowing that it was likely that he would go back to jail and cause hardship for his young daughter. What am I supposed to conclude from this? That he was born with the genes of a drug dealer?
Please don’t conflate “one opinion column” with “the NYT says”. Moreover, the people who needed to change their mind on gay marriage to go from 30% to over 50% weren’t exactly NYT readers.
Briefs to the Supreme Court are too late in the game to explain the change and not aimed at the public. It’s a lagging indicator.
What changes people’s minds it is hard to show in the best of circumstances. Self-reports are about as good as you can do. The self-reports back my position, not yours. That is to say that I’m sure the “science says” bit did help change minds, just not nearly as much as the other thing.
So I’ve demonstrated the kind of evidence I would accept. It just doesn’t help your case.
Here, by the way is an article on your side. I like the top comment.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/13k0xc4/the_born_gay_myth_when_ideology_masquerades_as/
You just brushing off people being gay back when it was a high-cost activity, even leading to prison/execution in many places still today, is indicative your model is wrong because it can’t incorporate this common phenomenon. See also: children being identified as gay very young (as another poster brought up).
Did Alan Turing ruin his life because someone lied to him about how being gay works? Do gays in much of the Islamic world risk serious penalty because it’s just a fun thing to do? Some people clearly have the strong predisposition others do not.
Most of this conversation has been about our senses of the important factors, culturally. In a battle of senses, appealing to an external source, whose raison d'etre is tracking cultural forces, and that is almost certainly in your direction politically, is evidence of the general sense. It doesn't say anything or require anything about NYT readers.
What self-reports? The self-reports of the NYT? Or your personal self-report? You and some buddies? What evidence have you shown of even self-reports? There are plenty of self-reports of folks who said that they were convinced by a version of 'born this way' or 'I know a guy who was born that way'. I don't think you've presented any sort of general evidence at all concerning any population statistics on self-reports. I don't think you've presented any sort of evidence at all. Just a wholesale rejection of all of the high-profile cultural evidence.
I don't see the relevance of your link.
No. I'm specifically saying that in literally every other case when we look at people who engage in high-cost/risk activity, we don't say, "They must have been born that way." Like, this is simply obscenely bad deductive reasoning. You cannot possibly be endorsing a version of, "For Activity X, if some number of people engage in Activity X in the face of high costs/risk, then we can conclude that people are born with the genes of Activity X."
What's most hilarious about this is that you're absolutely adamant that the bad science around born this way was completely irrelevant, but you just can't help yourself in that you're not making any argument at all about the cultural power around the idea and compulsively defending the idea, itself, but with, like, the shittiest version. Not even, "Here's some science," but like, "Yeah, my opinion, man," and, "Why would people endure high cost/risk for a chosen behavior?" Just hilariously bad. Your own behavior demonstrate just how utterly powerful and controlling the idea is.
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