Could watching porn make straight men support marriage equality?
That's what Mark Regnerus, who became infamous earlier this year when he published a now widely discredited study that supposedly found children of gay parents are worse off than those of straight parents, claimed on the Witherspoon Institute website late last week.
In his piece Regnerus states that porn "undermines the concept that in the act of sexual intercourse, we share our 'body and whole self ... permanently and exclusively'" and "reinforces the idea that people can share their bodies but not their inmost selves, and that they can do so temporarily and (definitely) not exclusively without harm."
He also notes that porn does not "discriminate" or rank one kind of sex act over another and therefore viewers are treated to a "veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity" (can this guy paint a picture, or what?) and end up believing that sex has nothing to do with "marital meaning."
So what happens when sex is divorced from being purely about marriage? Apparently men begin to think gay marriage is OK.
Regnerus reveals that "of the men who view pornographic material 'every day or almost every day,' 54 percent 'strongly agreed' that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that."
What's more,
The same pattern emerges for the statement, "Gay and lesbian couples do just as good a job raising children as heterosexual couples." Only 26 percent of the lightest porn users concurred, compared to 63 percent of the heaviest consumers. It's a linear association for men: the more porn they consume, the more they affirm this statement. More rigorous statistical tests confirmed that this association too is a very robust one.
What about women you ask? Regnerus avoids the topic of why women support marriage equality all together. He notes that, "women typically aren't as into porn as men are, and yet women in general tend to support same-sex marriage more readily than do men. A recent Gallup poll noted that 56 percent of women favor it, while only 42 percent of men do. No, this theory is not about women..."
Support for marriage equality has continues to increase in America. An ABC News-Washington Post poll in November found that 51 percent of Americans support marriage equality and in December a poll released by POLITICO and George Washington University found that 63 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds backed same-sex marriage.
So what do you think? Is porn responsible for the recent historic increase in support for marriage equality? Sound off in the comments section below.
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