The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and podcaster Joe Rogan had a spirited debate Monday on the hot-button topic of gay marriage and the role of relationships officially recognized by society.
During Spotify’s “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, the host asked Walsh why it is so difficult for people of opposing views of same-sex marriage to find common ground. Walsh, host of the hit documentary “What Is Woman?” said he believes marriage is “fundamentally a procreative male and female union.”
“There’s not really a compromise position there,” he said.
Rogan, who supports same-sex marriage, said he believes couples marry for other reasons besides procreation.
“There’s not a compromise in gay men that want to be married, love and want to formalize their bond so they can see their partner if there’s a medical emergency or if there’s a death where you assign assets to your loved one?” Rogan asked.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH MATT WALSH’S “WHAT IS A WOMAN?”
The pair went back and forth as Rogan noted that the important thing about having conversations by people who have “differing perspectives” is to have a “civil conversation on why they believe what they believe,” something he said that’s “so sadly uncommon in our culture.”
The podcaster also noted that these kinds of conversations are in fact “discouraged” today as they two continued to have a revealing discussion about the purpose of marriage as it relates to the participants as well as what it means for society.
Rogan’s own definition of marriage was “a legal union between two people that love each other.” But Walsh said marriage is both a union between two people and a public institution, and declared it is for society to sanction marriage for furtherance of the greater good.
“If it was just personal, then we wouldn’t even be having the conversation,” Walsh said. “Because people are loving who ever they are loving. That’s it there’s no way to control that.”
The public good that marriages should serve, Walsh said, is supporting a foundation for strong families.
“It is something that is reserved for that because the male-female union has this capacity to create life, whereas no other union has that capacity,” Walsh said. “And so it is a different kind of thing. And it makes sense to call it something different.”
Walsh posited a hypothetical in which survivors of a collapsed society awoke with amnesia and had to rebuild from scratch. If some “couplings” emerged that were capable of creating life, they would be more important to the collective than those which were not.
“Society needs that,” Walsh said. “You’re going to keep society going cause you’re creating people. And that’s what marriage was.”
Rogan pressed, noting that gay couples can have children through surrogacy, and their efforts to raise them to be productive were important for society. Walsh acknowledged at the point, but said such relationships are still different because “the union itself is not creating the child.”
Walsh added his belief that children “need a mom and a dad. That’s the way nature has set it up.”