‘Toxic Masculinity’ Has Slowed Australia’s March to Same-Sex Marriage<br />Second, and this is true in the United States and in Australia, it used to be the case<br />that the vast majority of gay and lesbian people were in the closet, so people were thinking about gay rights as an abstraction.<br />But one of the things we’ve learned in the last 10 years as various countries have come to advance gay rights — and I’ve written about this — is<br />that half of the countries in the globe that have legalized same-sex marriage have Catholic majorities or significant Catholic pluralities.<br />It ended up being a powerful engine for gay rights because for a long time when you said to Americans "gay rights," they flashed on the gay pride parade, on men in leather<br />and on "dykes on bikes." They flashed on people who wanted validation for what those other Americans saw as a transgressive lifestyle.<br />What surprises you about the way the same-sex marriage debate has played out in Australia — especially considering<br />that Australia is one of the last holdouts among English-speaking democracies to legalize it?<br />Now, pretty much everywhere — I know this to be true in Australia without knowing much about the country — it’s a generational matter.<br />First, too much change, too quickly, frightens people — and I don’t think this is true just of Americans.
