Gay Parenting: Promise and Pitfalls | Dave Rubin | EP 266

if you would have said to me 10 years ago that i'd be having this conversation publicly first off that i knew that i'd be married i wouldn't have believed you that i'd have be having kids i wouldn't have believed you that i would be willing to talk about this or even someone that even someone that someone else might look to to help map it for them i'd say you were completely insane um this is not really something you know i'd rather talk about politics i'd rather talk about the culture wars and all of these other things this is a political party because we're trying to sketch out a pathway i suppose i mean our culture appears to have decided that gay marriage is well i don't know if acceptable is the right word it's become part of the structure of marriage itself and so now the question is okay what does that mean [Music] hello everyone i'm here today with my colleague and my friend mr dave rubin host of the reuben report a top ranking online talk show known to many of you he's an author comedian and tv personality best known for his political and cultural commentary mr rubin began his career like so many people in the online world as a stand-up comedian and continues to perform on stage in that guys throughout the us in an effort to combat big tech censorship reuben founded locals.com a subscription-based digital platform that empowers creators to be independent by giving them control over their content and data something we could all use dave's first book don't burn this book thinking for yourself in an age of unreason was a new york times bestseller his second book don't burn this country surviving and thriving in our woke dystopia was published by penguin random house on april 12 2022 dave and i got to know each other first when he was one of the earliest public figures to support my efforts on the fight against compelled speech in canada and elsewhere and then more deeply when he opened for me in 125 cities during my 2018 book tour i concentrated during that tour talking to my audiences on many issues pertaining to responsibility and meaning including family life and that's what we're going to talk about today mr rubin currently resides in miami with his husband david janet and their rescue dog clyde good to see you dave it's good to see you my friend i have to say this this feels a little bizarre to me we've done so many of these in so many different cities and countries and different chairs and on skype and zoom in every which way and i'm usually reading your bio i know i know this is bizarre i know i don't usually interview you but we we talked together a couple of weeks ago you have big changes coming up in your life and we talked about having a serious conversation about that i know that please correct me if i'm saying anything that isn't accurate a lot of what i talked about when we were together on the 2018 tour was the responsibility or the meaning that's inherent in responsibility and the kind of meaning that sustains people through crisis and catastrophe and part of my the propositions i was putting forward i suppose was that most of that meaning is to be found in responsibility especially to other people and i talked a lot about the role of family in people's lives and at that point you really hadn't been considering children not seriously although your partner your husband was more committed to that than you were you said you've told me that your views changed to some degree at least in part as a consequence of us communicating over the course of that entire year so maybe you could fill people in on that front and let let them know what's happening yeah sure well so david and i met 13 years ago yesterday and i know it was yesterday because we met on my birthday believe it or not it was on my birthday and then i got an even weirder one for you it was at the gay pride parade in new york city which now they've become sort of these sort of crazy circuses but back then it wasn't quite like that but i actually literally remember when he walked into the room and he was wearing an american flag tank top which i'm pretty sure you can't wear to a pride parade anymore but in any event uh we've been together for about 12 years we've been married for seven years and i'm 46 now so i grew up in a time when i never even first off i struggled with my sexuality for a long time partly we've discussed this i felt you know people it's sort of like a homer simpson quote that i love and i know you can do the simpsons thing all the time uh i like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming and i sort of thought that was what it meant that gay even though i was attracted to men that gay meant something else gay men like you like the theater or you like to dance or you like madonna or something and i didn't really care for any of those things so i really had some some distance between my feelings and and my attractions and sort of the way the world could map to that so to speak and as a as a gen xer um there was nothing we never talked about gay marriage you didn't even talk about anything gay there was nothing you know growing up in the 90s there were there was no role model to look at um you're the only person that i ever saw on television that made any sense to me was in two episodes of the golden girls blanche's brother comes out as gay and he marries a cop this is 1991 nbc prime time obviously gay marriage wasn't legal for another 30 years or something but so i had no role models i had no nothing so i sort of just never thought about getting married having a family truthfully and i didn't even realize this until we were on tour i never thought of the future i sort of thought of my present all the time and then when we were on tour flash forward a bit david and i got married and even when we got married we never really talked about having kids or even what a family meant we knew we we love each other and we have a great time together and you know we love the same things and i think in most ways we bring out the best in each other um sometimes we bring out the worst in each other and that probably that's probably good you're married exactly um but then right around when we were on tour so now this is 2018. uh david started talking about having kids and we were texting a lot about it while we were on tour and then i'm with you on you know on stage every night as you said in 125 cities for about a year and a half and you're constantly talking about the importance of family and the importance that for most people and this is the way you would always say it it's hard to quote jordan peterson exactly but something to the effect of that for most people to live a fully actualized life that being a parent is a integral part of that it is only there's almost no exceptions to that you would always make a point there are some exceptions you might yeah but you have to be exceptional to to have an exception to that so yes maybe it's a third job and career and that sort of service to the broader community and it's a third year intimate relationship and then it's a third children and family um and those proportions can vary but if you miss one of those there's a big gap to fill and maybe you can fill it you know if you if another one of your endeavors has the expansive quality necessary to occupy two-thirds of your time more power to you i suppose but it's a big risk and so you also told me dave when we were talking about this before that you you started to think about being older as well and i suppose that then that with your concentration on the present and the lack of role models that there was no real vision for what it might be like to well to grow old in the gay community i suppose yeah and you know it's funny i i the gay community i i hate that phrase i know even even as you said it it's like it doesn't mean anything to me i don't think of you as part of the straight community you know it's just one of these things we say these things we don't even know exactly why we're saying them but i didn't have that role model i didn't have that there was no map there really brotherhood of the marginalized yes that's a group i could be part of i suppose in some bizarre sense um but even that is sort of nauseating i guess um but but so we're on tour together and david's texting me and we're going back and we're talking on the phone and we're face time and it just keeps coming up and you keep talking about this on stage and on top of everything else i'm meeting all of the people that are attending the shows and you know this the amount of people that were in new families or that the wife was pregnant for the first time and i'm seeing the joy on these people's faces all of this is hitting me and then you keep saying this thing that for most people they have to do it but there are these exceptions and i kept thinking well wait a minute could i be the exception that i could live a fully actualized best possible life without having kids and at the same time be married to someone who wants kids that then what am i even married for well right right well that does beg that question right so now these are these things are really hitting each other and because i had nev because the map wasn't there the road map just wasn't there i started going man i really have to think about this now and i remember one night we were on you were on stage and you know i had the best seat in the house every night because i'm just off stage left so i'm basically watching his right is actually better the stage i guess yeah i suppose it depends which country we're in uh but i'm you know i'm basically watching you from behind so i have sort of the back view of you to the crowd so i genuinely felt that every night that i was part of the show every night in that sense part of the audience and i remember you said it one more time and i thought all right i i have to do this i have to do this. and that's why it was always incredibly honest when i would say to the crowd that that being on tour with you for every reason that they were there that you helped these people change their lives that you did that to me too but now and i think the purpose of this conversation which by the way if you would have said to me 10 years ago that i'd be having this conversation publicly first off that i knew that i'd be married i wouldn't have believed you that i'd have be having kids i wouldn't have believed you that i would be willing to talk about this or even someone that even someone that someone else might look to to help map it for them i'd say you were completely insane um this is not really something you know i'd rather talk about politics i'd rather talk about the culture wars and all of these other things this is a political party because we're trying to sketch out a pathway i suppose i mean our culture appears to have decided that gay marriage is well i don't know if acceptable is the right word it's become part of the structure of marriage itself and so now the question is okay what does that mean and that certainly opens up the question on the child front because i mean in in some ways marriage is the union of two people but in a possibly more fundamental way it's the union of two people to provide the foundation for children right and i would say that's actually paramount i mean our society tends to flip that around and we tend to think of marriage as something that while you find the partner right for you and you live happily ever after it's well no not exactly yeah and but or maybe maybe exactly if you also understand that living happily ever after means living for other people in many ways particularly your children and so and then of course that complicates the issue on the gay marriage front because as we're going to talk about it's also more technically difficult to have children if you're a homosexual couple right so if you take just the the marriage part first meaning that two people are going to choose to share their life and live together you know share a bed etc etc i would say culturally in america we kind of moved past that i mean trump ran he's the first first-time president he was on stage with a rainbow flag it was you know and nobody cared no i shouldn't say nobody cared but the enough people felt okay you let people live the way they want to to put this down and and move ahead but you're right that marriage has to do with something else otherwise otherwise the word marriage wouldn't mean anything it's like nobody really cares if you live with your friend for the rest of your life or you live with a man or a woman you know people people do this all the time in life and it doesn't really matter so what really is the purpose of really living with somebody and really being with somebody and sharing your life with somebody is to build something lasting something that i think something that you've learned and know and we're taught and that you can hand that on to the next generation and hopefully they can attain and retain some of that permanence in your life too right yeah multi-generational permanent stretching indefinitely into the future i mean part of what marriage does i think technically it's the psychological equivalent of what sex does genetically you know if people mix comedies to meets gametes games gametes partly because to to ensure variability uh and to stop the propagation of parasites that's why we don't clone but there's that mixing as well tends to ensure that deviations from genetic health are minimized and so the same thing happens on the psychological affront i would say is that each person has their own idiosyncrasies and some of those lead them down the garden path to terrible places but if you're with someone else and you have to negotiate with them constantly then that opens up the possibility of you mutually modifying each other's personalities so that you both become healthier and that your joint existence is a kind of can be a paragon of sorts and then that's what the child interacts with is that united front of the two parents right and so you get that longevity of view which i think helps to mature you but you also get the opportunity to become more fully fledged as a psychological being and then i think that's furthered as well i've often thought and said this and i do believe it's true it's very very difficult to mature until you have children and there are other ways of maturing but it's hard and the reason it's hard i think is because you're not mature until someone else is more important than you and it's possible that that would happen with your wife your husband but not like with children well i've been thinking about that so you know we're about to have our first child in a month and i've been thinking about that a lot lately like it's just something that's constantly stirring in my head that i feel like i've sort of gotten to the end of where i can get mature in my maturation process not that i can't change or get better at this or that or something but i do feel like i'm at the end of one phase right now i really i very much feel that and i think i'm feeling it more and more each day as we get closer to august 22nd which is the due date um but you know the first part you know you can you can take whether it's a straight relationship or or a gay relationship the dance that a couple can do and the way that they can mature each other and love each other and all of those things that that's one thing but the the peace with the kids with building this sustainable thing it's not something that has been proven in society yet really you know there obviously are gay couples with kids this has been happening for decades but it really is sort of unseen at the moment which is why we wanted to have this conversation and i was like boy i don't even know that in some ways i don't know that i'm the person that's supposed to have this conversation but maybe that's exactly why i'm supposed to have maybe we can talk about exactly how it came to be that you'll have a baby in your household in six weeks talk about what you had to do to make that happen and why you made why you made the decisions that you made and what advantages and hazards come along with that sure so first technically because there are biological differences between men and women i don't want to get us cancelled on youtube but it actually is true jordan uh you know we could not biologically have kids so you know just ourselves so we just we talked about adoption for a little bit we did we both felt that the genetic component of this was important to us um so for a little while we debated uh going with my sister's egg we thought we'd have two kids that was the the general thought process in the beginning and we thought we could uh take some of my sister's eggs and she's a mother now she's actually pregnant with her third uh but that we could get her eggs and then we would take david's sperm and then we would have two children from that after a long time of talking about a year debating that back and forth and going through all that there were a lot of ethical and moral issues and my my sister then would sort of would be the biological mother of my children i mean there were all sorts of things that we were about to traverse right and that's all uncharted territory right all sorts of things yeah you think you know how that might go and you think you know how it might go if you have good will but that does not mean that you know how it will go and i have to say even that conversation having that conversation with my sister who was interested in you know when when we came to her she was sort of flattered and honored that we were even considering it but then you know we said why don't you stay with this for a little bit and then suddenly she had a lot of those questions and she was concerned if you know she shows up to the birthday party and then feels this odd jealousy or what if she suddenly wasn't happy with the way that we were parenting or that's a big one or a litany of other things so even going through that and this this obviously is not the way that we ultimately went about it even that was sort of a maturation process and like you know what are we really trying to do here so anyway ultimately we decided to find a an egg donor i mean basically it sounds sort of uh glib or something but it's it's sort of like tinder i mean you can there are these websites that exist where the egg donors are on the site and you try we tried to find a girl i didn't really care that much about the pedigree in terms of did they go to an ivy league school or anything like that we wanted to find a girl who obviously was physically healthy most importantly um that you know that didn't have major issues in terms of genetics and all that sort of stuff that we thought that sort of looked like the type of girl that we might be with so i didn't want you know a six foot five swedish woman let's say um and so we have one egg donor meaning there were multiple eggs and we fertilized one with david sperm and one with my sperm and we'll have two kids right now we have two surrogates that are pregnant and even talking about this it's like man i get this is this is all kind of crazy stuff putting aside putting aside gay or straight related to all of this the whole surrogacy thing is is it's fascinating that there are first off women who are willing to to donate their eggs and you know i i hear a lot of people we talked about this there's this criticism of somehow that you're you're buying the egg and you're renting the woman yeah the surrogate yeah and of course there is a financial component to it there is i'm not denying that there is i can tell you having gone through this process and and we had a previous surrogate who had two miscarriages they were also you know we were doing a lot of this during kovid and during covet they were all sort the miscarriage numbers were through the roof there were all sorts of weird things the quality of the eggs wasn't great they don't know exactly they'll have to study this for years in terms of what actually happened but i can tell you that the women who offer to be the surrogates and who are offering their eggs they are not doing this for the money there's all sorts of other ways that you can make money that anyone can make money they are doing it they are they talk about that they have this ability and this gift that they can do um a lot of them there are some that won't do it for same-sex couples because of their own ethical or religious views um the surrogates that we found they actually one of them had a gay brother i mean there were all sorts of things that they feel that they can help other people have a family and what a better gift there is but but all of that aside all the science and genetics and all that it leads us to this thing which i think is the heart of what we're what we're trying to talk about here which is so we're going to be a family with two fathers and and no mothers and what does that really look like you know it's very easy to just say okay gay people should have kids or gay people should get married and gay people should just say it's easy to say an awful lot as you said it's not that easy for a gay couple to have kids right so very complicated so putting aside the if you're going to go to the surrogacy room putting aside all the finances and all of that stuff that eliminates an awful lot of people from even being able to do it fortunately we're able to do it okay but now it gets us to the to the real part here which is that now we're gonna live in a household with two fathers there's going to be no mother involved and and what does that really mean and i understand some of the reservations well yeah well so we do know we do know that children who are breastfed do better yep i believe that one year of breastfeeding is equivalent to i think breastfed kids have a five point iq advantage and one point iq is worth one year of education i have two freezers in my garage two industrial freezers full of breast milk right that's right has done all the research on this right so another complication but okay and so and we don't have data we don't really have data on motherless children raised by fathers from infancy right because it's pretty rare i don't know if there's literature pertaining to that at all we do have a literature on mother-headed families without fathers and the data there are crystal clear it's not good to be fatherless now that doesn't mean that there aren't some women who are struggling mightily as single mothers who don't do an outstanding job but what it absolutely and 100 percent means that on average that's sub-optimal and badly sub-optimal and so it seems to me that the minimal stable requirement for ensuring the psychological health and financial viability of a child is something like a nuclear family structure minimally right so you need a mother and a father or at least you need two people one who plays a maternal role and one who plays a paternal role or that they split those two seems to be better than one now how much of that's linked to sex we also don't know you know it it seems that the the feminine role is more slash nurturing you see that with the proclivity of women to be more agreeable temperamentally that kicks in at puberty and so i think that you have to be accepting and nurturing especially in your attitude towards infants before they're mobile so say before six months before nine months an infant does no wrong it's 100 acceptance the problem with that is that that's not true as the child develops because it has to switch to more of an encouraging role it's like out of your dependency into the world and the paternal spirit encourages that development now mothers can do that too but but roughly speaking women tend to do the nurturing thing more and men do the encouraging thing more so now the question is how do you mediate how do you manage to fulfill both those roles in the absence of a heterosexual arrangement right so now naturally we understand that there are men who are more nurturing and women who aren't as nurturing and all of those things now you you know david pretty well and we've been out to dinner with tammy many times yeah and you know him he is incredibly warm and nurturing and loving and deeply cares about all those things and i'm telling you he is reading about skin to skin contact every day yeah and all of the breast milk stuff and everything and i know he will have a huge percentage of the stuff that a mother would bring but i also know it's not all of it well he knows the other thing too is that you guys have to do that consciously yes right with the with research in hand and to build up that proclivity that would be there more automatically arguably with the mother and all the psychological and hormonal transformations she undergoes and that transition into breast milk production and all of that which is a fundamental transformation in a woman's biology and her psyche now you and david have ample resources at hand financially and intellectually that enable you to traverse this pathway as well as anyone is likely to do it but it is very interesting and salutary to hear you also talk about the complications so so on the feminine side let's say you you think you have the nurturance angle well covered you talk to me a little bit about having women around in in your infant and child's life as well yeah so david's mom is going to be living with us for a few months at the start as well as his sister who's taken care of young babies already but now i understand that they're they're not the biological mother but they will be there you know we're going to have night nurses uh also for a few months to help the babies get on on a normal sleep schedule but these are all the pieces that we're we're trying to put together but can we just back up for one second because i think before we go too deep into just the parental part of this there was another thing that came up when we sort of roughly sketched out this conversation over dinner that i think is important which is that if if you weren't to allow gay people to either get married and enter relationships that will last the test of time or have children to really last the generations then what are we reducing these people to and i think that's a huge part of this for me um that i think had the world not shifted to be a little bit kinder had i not maybe been on tour with you and come to some of these realizations or found someone in the world that i wanted to put their needs above my own that i could have been left to a life that would have been sort of purely narcissistic or self-destructive or anything you know i used to live well i don't see how that in some sense i don't see how that can be there can be any alternatives to that if there isn't another pathway forward yes and and so that's the to me that's like the unknown road that i'm going down right now that i want choosing to go down that unknown road of oh it can be better than that right i i don't i as i said i don't have i have two we have two or three couples that are uh gay parents that are doing some version of this but we don't have that model but then when you know we lived in west hollywood west hollywood is the gayest place on earth you know rainbow crosswalks and the whole thing and to me i would see these guys that were you know 65 70 years old that all they had basically was that they worked out they spray tanned and got hair plugs they had their little dogs and they partied on the weekends and probably chased the same sexual escapades that they were chasing 40 years ago right and it's not adolescence yeah and it's not it's not a full life and i actually it's like i feel i have like almost like a visceral feeling when i talk about it because i know that that could have been me so when i see these people that either at this point are against gay marriage but but in general there are there don't seem to be that many voices publicly about that anymore so here's a rough question so do you think both the flamboyance now i i want to get into this in some detail but the flamboyance that's been historically associated with the male headers homosexual community community sorry about that and the and the promiscuity do you think to what degree do you think that both of those are a consequence of not having a more integrated and conservative path potentially open in front of people i think it's a huge amount that probably will never be fully explained if people don't have an ability look what was the gay rights movement for in the 70s in new york city and stonewall and all of those things it was these people just wanted well they wanted to be able to get married that was part of it but it was also that they wanted to be able to go to a bar that wasn't underground that wasn't hidden that wasn't you know this seedy thing but that's what they had to do because they were getting raided by the police and this was going on obviously in other countries and it was going on for decades before that but they wanted some sense of normalcy if you don't leave people some little seeds of normalcy then they will do all sorts of things so the flamboyant part there's two parts you're asking about so the flamboyant part i'm just not built that way i'm not sometimes i used to you know i used to when i was first sort of coming out or coming to grips with myself i actually liked guys that were kind of flamboyant because i in my to me it was like oh they're so who they are like they had just let go of every sort of normal cliche or something like that they're so right they are on that kind of existential courage yeah and yet yet they always really like generally gays they like straight acting that's a that's a real thing with with gays they like straight acting so guys always liked me because i didn't seem gay whatever that meant and i thought it sort of meant that i was broken in a weird way because it made me feel like a sort of like double freak in an odd sense right right because i was struggling here for the straight community and too straight for the queer community well said man uh and and so i was sort of grappling with that so there was this there's the flamboyant part and then and then you're asking about the the sex side of it it's like if you don't leave people with some ability to say oh you can be in a lasting relationship this is why marriage equality was so important now this is a sidebar but i would never force a church or a mosque or a synagogue to perform a wedding that it was against its beliefs but from a secular perspective to whatever uh respect we remain secular in this country if you don't give people the same opportunity to be in a relationship and then learn all the things that you talked about before how you go through that churning with your partner and hopefully make each other better and sometimes make each other worse and all that stuff what will you leave them with you will leave them with their carnal desires and i definitely could have gone down that road with a and i definitely didn't go down that road um rebelliousness right because who knows what happens if you're not allowed so to speak to be who you are then it strikes me as highly probable that an excessive amount of rebelliousness is going to start to look attractive right and maybe to be indistinguishable from courage i would say it's got to be the case that the hope so to speak of the more enlightened conservative types who were willing to open the door to gay marriage was that by bringing those relationships inside the traditional fold that things would normalize yeah and that there would be a promotion of something like stable mature responsible long-term monogamy well i think maybe i'm trying to prove that yeah i'm not i'm not trying to prove it like i'm setting out to prove it but i suppose de facto because of my life i'm trying to prove that i mean in a weird way although i'm probably the unlikeliest of conservatives in that sense it's like what life am i trying to live i'm trying to live a life that is somewhat conservative in nature in that sense meaning that i believe that family is important and probably the most important thing after the individual that's that's how societies are built i fundamentally believe that so it's weird it's like my my worldview because otherwise what are you saying to people so okay okay you're gay so you can either just endlessly have sex or endlessly disregard every norm known to man and just have nothing other than wake up and just live life how you want what other way is there to integrate into society to really integrate into society i mean to me this this is it well i think that's why the culture did take the decision that it took which was to open the doors let's say now we talked about that i want to get into that too because the cl we have this notion that's rife in our culture let's say that's insisted upon that all families are equally are equal and i understand the emphasis on that from the let's call it the tolerance perspective but i think that it's badly flawed in one manner and i think this will be the hardest thing probably for us to discuss is that you can't flatten out distinctions without a tremendous loss and i don't think it's possible to dispense with the ideal of heterosexual monogamy now as the ideal yes that's so if we think well there's an ideal individual who's responsible and mature and far-seeing and honest an honest trader a good player uh an honorable person honorable decent person and then there's the minimal requirement for a family that's ideal and that's something approximating heterosexual long-term heterosexual monogamy and maybe you have two decent people united together and then there's a firm platform for children now the problem with that as an ideal is that we all fall short of the ideal and so right half 40 of people are going to get divorced and of the people who don't get divorced a good percentage of them are in pretty damn miserable marriages now that doesn't condemn marriage but it does show how difficult attaining that ideal is and then there's going to be people who lose their partners and raise children alone and they're going to be people who raise children alone by happenstance or or choice and they it doesn't seem reasonable to what would you say um put them outside the bounds of civilized society let's say that by the same token it doesn't seem reasonable to dispense with the ideal yeah so maybe we need something like well we know what the ideal is it's a divine ideal in some sense in that none of us can live up to it but then there has to be a space around that ideal where the individual differences and flaws and peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of people aren't treated so harshly that that becomes counterproductive in and of itself it's damning with faint praise but i don't see no that's it that's it that's it it's that's the meat of this more than anything else that there is of course there's an ideal of course there is an ideal there has to be an ideal and and if well there's nothing to aim at if there's not a ideal because if if there isn't if the ideal isn't two people male and female in a heterosexual relationship then what is it is it four people is it eight people is it one person like instantly you go from that kind of narrow ideal to an intense multiplicity and we've certainly seen the problems that are associated with that and so you can't just blow out the confines of the ideal without destabilizing well like maybe you destabilize society at the level of the family and that seems to me to be a really bad idea well it's a really bad idea and i think we're seeing some of the repercussions of that right now right i mean we've seen the ex the excesses of what the woke or the progressives or whatever that is that are now destabilizing everything this is why i've said this i've gotten into trouble for saying it a few times but i'm sympathetic to to conservatives who go boy you know we we let gay marriage happen and look what's happened since now now we're into all this gender stuff and they're literally teaching gender theory to five-year-olds who know nothing about gender or sex or anything else but but the issue really is so okay so if we have the ideal really what we're talking about here is what do we do with these marginal cases the marginal cases meaning okay so now this modern question right so but so what do we really do with that so now okay so there are going to be gay couples who want to approximate to that ideal so what does a society do does a society try to help them get there or does the society just never talk about it push them to the margins or and push it underground right so what we're trying to do right here is unearth that a little bit so i don't deny the importance of a mother by no stretch as i said we're going to try to have as many strong female role models as possible but i don't think it will replicate a mother by the way when you talk children are pretty good at bonding with adults who aren't their biological relatives what children don't like is instability in their primary caregiver they really hate having primary caregivers swap because their primary caregiver is their whole world and so basically if you substitute one for another say six months into the child's life then it's as if everything the child knows has been flipped upside down so they don't like that they're perfectly capable of bonding with multiple people though and there doesn't seem to be any developmental downside to that in fact perhaps quite the contrary you know i don't think it's so bad for a child to have a variety of role models to choose from and i certainly don't think it's impossible for you to replicate both the masculine and the feminine influences in your children's life i would just say well it's difficult might be more difficult even if you're a homosexual couple but it's difficult if you're it's difficult and there are plenty of heterosexual couples so where both partners are essentially feminine in their temperamental both partners are essentially masculine now we don't know enough about that to differentiate it right down to the ultimate degree but the problem that you guys will face isn't of a categorically different type necessarily than the problem that many couples face absolutely and there are also when you talk about the the ideal and then the way that everyone fits into that ideal or tries to get to that ideal there are parents who obviously abuse their kids or abuse each other and alcoholics and all these things i'm in no way comparing being a gay parent to that but the point is that there is there is an ideal situation and then there's what society and then there's reality so it's like okay so should society stop people who are alcoholics from having kids or stop people who or licensed parents after intensive training right well that's that's the road that this really would go down yeah well we've already kind of decided that too because one of the things the state doesn't do is determine who's a fit parent right and we love rules well it's very strange in some sense because it's the most important thing you'll ever do and yet while you're not compelled to have an education for example around parenting issues before you become a parent and we've decided everywhere in the world i would say maybe without exception that that's one place the government doesn't go and that's a very interesting decision for everyone to have made it's quite surprising in some fundamental sense i guess we know that in that situation in particular a variety of approaches might be the best so something like that well so i guess i guess my question for you as i traverse this is so if we acknowledge that that ideal situation and again just using the word ideal i know that there's a certain set of people that will watch that go and see reuben's saying his relationship or he is less than yeah it isn't right well that's the key part of dispensing the bloody ideal just because it's difficult to attain right and and just because because we all we all are we all all are flawed in our own way i mean really who i think you said this to me at dinner but it's like who amongst us is walking around as the ideal partner the ideal person the ideal the ideal everything the ideal father ideal anything yeah yeah virtually nobody is doing that well if they are then the ideal isn't high enough because an ideal should be something that beckons to you from the distance right it's not something that's right there in front of you for you to grip that's not much of an ideal well if we'd have a lot more people who were acting that way if it was that easy yeah i suppose right like there's not a lot of people doing it so i i think what what i'm trying to figure out here is how does that how does this life i think fit into [Music] whatever's coming in this new world you know we seem to be entering a new world right now we're watching an old world go away and we're entering this new world i'm sort of part of this new conservative world and kind of where where does it all fit well so well so here's a question here's a question that's relevant to that so it's good politically and correct question and so in some sense the the more traditional community has opened itself up to the possibility of including gay marriage in the purview of of the acceptable and traditional yeah okay so what responsibility come along for people who are homosexual in relationship to the expansion of that right what do you think about that i mean i know what you've done yeah well i think it's it's a respect for that it's an acknowledgement that something is good there and that we have to we have to be tolerant of the questions i i guess that's it when i see this now suddenly like you know when when we announced that we were having kids there was some pushback online from more religious people on the right by the way 99 of it was all anonymous people it was virtually nobody uh that well certainly nobody that i knew there were one or two people that had blue checks on twitter but it was all these people you know talking about the sanctity of marriage and all of these things but i'm willing to have that conversation i i accept that this is yeah i i genuinely accept that this is this is a little bit weird this is a little bit you know but it's like if we don't have these conversations then then the thing that we're pulling apart by pulling apart marriage and the family just by saying it is anything and everything at the exact same time right well that is far more dangerous that's far more dangerous so that's why even as i'm sitting here now i'm sort of like ah i partly don't want to have this conversation because it's like i don't know the answers to all of these things but i know that we have to be able to do it you're supposed to talk when you don't know the answers because then maybe you can think it through and you can exchange views with other people and you can you can you can expand your knowledge in that domain of ignorance i want to go back to something you said you decided the two of you decided that genetic similarity was an important was an important factor to take into account yeah now obviously that's issue doesn't arise in the case of fertile heterosexual couples it does if they have to adopt or if they decide to adopt instead um and we know that people there is a preference quite a marked preference although this might not be so clear with adoption if you have a step parent and you're a child who's not biologically related to the step parent you're at way higher risk for abuse like way way higher i don't remember how many fold higher but it's it's a tremendous amount i think it's the single most predictive risk factor i suppose that would probably scrap with alcohol use but so people are more positively inclined to their genetic relatives now the exact details of that aren't clear and it's not surprising if you think like a biologist that that would be the case but but this had to be a conscious decision on your part and it wasn't a decision that you guys necessarily had to take so why did you decide that that was important yeah man it's it's one of those things well you know i also had heard you talk about this this part of growing of of parenting and seeing yourself in this child and see your relatives too you see everything i suppose i think i don't know that i have a good answer for this actually but you both decided we knew it we knew it we knew it when we decided we didn't want to adopt that we just knew i don't know what i don't even know how to describe it yeah there was something important when we had that conversation okay are we going to adopt and we really did think about it it would have been way easier it would have been way less expensive and all of those things yeah it's a strange thing that that can't be articulated i don't know i don't know that i can articulate well you might ask yourself on on on the similar front it's like well there's lots of unwanted babies in the world and so why isn't the ethical thing when you're a heterosexual couple just to adjust an unwanted baby why bring another baby into the world when there's a baby that could use a home and the answer is that isn't what people do and then the question might be well why and you can come up with a biological rationale but that doesn't mean that there's a conceptual a conceptual answer handy like why do you want your own kids and the answer to that is something like well that's what everyone has always done since the beginning of time it's something like that right but it's not really an answer no no well or take this is part of partly why conservatives are set back on their heels so frequently when they're questioned by radicals because the radicals will do something like well justify marriage and the conservative thinks well we all agreed about that like 50 000 years ago and so i don't actually have a fully fleshed out explicit rationale and and defense for the institution of marriage i thought that was self-evident and i would say the preference for your own biological children has that self-evidence about it there is a cruelty about that in some real sense right but i i suppose that's the cruelty of specifically loving some people more than you're capable of loving everyone else so maybe we just have to accept that some things are self-evident rather than endlessly wonder why they're selfish well that's what right conservative would say well then i suppose i became the most unlikely conservative of all of all that it in some ways it doesn't really matter but i know that it is i know that it was when we sat there and had that conversation when push came to shove we said no we we want to have if we're having two kids let's have one from each of us some of it is look look it's i really love tammy yeah and it's quite something to see your echoed in the kids yeah you know my son it's turned out that michaela perhaps looks more like me and julian looks more like tammy but i can see tammy and him and i'm pretty happy about that you know and so and i suspect hopefully she feels the same way on the other side so that love for the person is also echoed in their replication in the children and then there's more than that too because like when my son was really little he really like an infant just a newborn infant he would have facial expressions that i could see were my dad it's like oh man he looks exactly like that he has exactly the same facial expression and so that echoing of other people that you love that's not nothing yeah you know and that doesn't mean that if you adopt a child you can't come to love that child as if they're your own clearly that's possible but that doesn't mean it's optimal and it doesn't mean it's easy and without pitfalls and i think the data on step parents makes that really clear it's just part of the reason we talked about this a little bit too part of the reason that heterosexual monogamy is the ideal is because it's also got you can't beat it in terms of efficient right you said how difficult it was to produce a child it's not that difficult at all if you're two heated up fifteen-year-olds in the back of your father's car and you're pretty much yeah exactly it's like it's like it's as easy as falling off the bed too easy in some sense perhaps but but but that also indicates that ease and efficiency also is a solid reason why a certain kind of ideal exists you guys had to jump through hoops and not everyone could do that they don't have the resources and so that that's another obstacle it's a lot and again without that map without that you know that's the interesting thing for me it's like as i've sort of shifted politically as you know about and so much my life has been about politics and talking about what i think for a living and then suddenly man all of my political thoughts all of the the stuff that i talk about all the time and government all these things now it's really like it's all sitting right in front of me right now the the difference between your own personal morality and the way government is and our role in all of these things um i i it's like i'm trying to do i'm trying it's just the self-evident part of this i'm trying to do what i know is right right right right trying to do whatever i do that's right always explicitly explicitly explainable and maybe right isn't the word i'm trying to do what i know no i'm trying to do what i'm trying to do what i know i'm supposed to do how about that yeah well that would be good that would be good to try to figure out what that is and to walk that path that's a good thing if you can manage it another thing we talked about a little bit in relation decided to discuss today in relationship to the ideal was this is also an extremely contentious issue in case we haven't covered enough contentious issues already um as the and and this goes back to the issue of the conservatives who took issue with gay marriage it's like okay we're trying we're starting to break down the categorical boundaries here where is that going to go well we've seen where it goes at least to some degree and as i said i'm sympathetic to this i really am sympathetic to this argument i see it i see it i see what they were worried about and unfortunately the left uh you you tweeted out something a couple weeks ago you know i was never a conservative until the liberals decided there were no rules yeah i'm paraphrasing you roughly but i'm sympathetic to that so much of all of the things that we knew we no longer know at a societal level apparently and be and that's between a man and a woman well we we could talk about that in relationship again to use this hated phrase to the lgbt plus community yeah first of all the notion that that's an integral community is foolish efficiently as you add more and more uh letters i have no innate knowledge of what it is more innate knowledge of what it is to be like to be trans than you do i i happen i'm male i'm a cisgendered male i am a man born in a man's body i happen to be attracted to men you are a man born in a man's body you happen to be attracted to women but i have no more in common with a trans person yeah thank you fact of marginalization the arguable factor but that is not that is not a unifying force that is not something to put on a flag and say now we are all together because of this well the question is can you see that's the theory in some sense is that the marginalized have more in common than that what differentiates them and i yeah i don't buy that well there's a quasi ethnocentrism and and even a racism that's associated with that right the different are categorically different and they're all and different in the same way well that's the next step but but the rubbers really hit the road in a terrible way recently because you tell me what you think about this i followed ken zucker's work on the trans on trans kids now zucker worked at a place called camh in toronto major mental health institution and he was a mainline scientific researcher not a political type at all really a dedicated clinician and researcher and he ran a gender dysphoria treatment clinic probably the clinic and he was the editor of the main journals where research on that sort of topic was published and what zucker his treatment program for kids with gender dysphoria was quite straightforward he observed as a consequence of his careful research that about 85 of kids who manifest extreme gender dysphoria so the sense of discomfort in their own body and a desire to be the opposite sex 80 to 85 percent of them would desist on their own by the age of 18 or 19. and so his hypothesis was leave them the hell alone because you do the least harm that way and most of them will settle into their bodies as they mature knowing that puberty in particular especially for kids you could imagine a male who has a more feminine temperament and who's also perhaps higher in openness so has a more mutable identity more creative is going to be and and is going to be especially if higher neuroticism as well is going to be uncomfortable around puberty everyone's uncomfortable around puberty we should we should make that straight and so you just leave those you leave the kids alone but what he also showed and this is the killer fact as far as i'm concerned is that a very large proportion of kids with gender dysphoria grow up and are homosexual yes and so what that means what that certainly means is that the vast majority it might be as high as 80 of the kids who are being convinced now that they inhabit the wrong bodies and are being surgically mutilated on a in a permanent and terrible manner the overwhelming majority of them are gay well so think how twisted this is well just so i know you know this but so think about it this way so as i said before i i seem to be people always say to me i'm more straight acting i seem to be more you wouldn't just meet me on the street no i'm not like okay this guy is gay right so when i was five or seven when i was growing up or i'm 10 years old i was playing with g.i joe and transformers and i liked war and battle and all of those boy thought of things now there are plenty of gay kids that are growing up that like barbie or they like you know dressing up or whatever that might be in today's world the teacher at the school or the administrator or the gender expert or whatever would probably be coaching them towards saying that they were trans where they would have left someone like me alone there would be nothing to think about so in an odd sense the trans movement is extremely anti-gay that that's something that these people really have to grapple with there are gay people who are very effeminate but they still happen to be men i mean there is by the way a growing movement in again that gay community phrase of of gay people who really are pushing back on this they're really realizing well it's the worst part the worst possible outcome in some sense well because it's also making it's making right because it's making gay people all seem like extremists it goes back to what we started with so when stonewall happened and the fight for equality the fight for equality is just the fight for equality is always just so black people can vote so women can vote in my estimation so that gay people can get married the fight for equality is good and it's a true liberal thing to fight for once you go from that the activists still needed more and what did they turn that to they turned that to the kids the average person who was who was protesting at stonewall if you would have said to them you know the average person that was 35 years old that was at a bar it said well i want to be able to go to a bar that has windows maybe that aren't blocked out that isn't underground and all of these things and and be in a relationship that i don't have to hide whatever actually 30 years from now 40 years from now this is going to be about uh sending your kid to school where they're going to privately discuss sex with teachers hormonal transformation and surgery right and more than that to make and here's another perverse element of this so many legislatures around the world now have banned so-called conversion therapy and to me this has been a catastrophe now i know that there is a small percentage mostly of fundamentalist christian therapist types in the u.s who were offering their services to homosexual people who were unhappy with their sexual orientation and so you could have a discussion about whether that's ever appropriate or not although i would say that's bloody well between the person and their therapist as far as i'm concerned but now that's illegal and it's illegal to the point where you are required by the uh conditions of your psychological association your professional associations american psychological association let's say to affirm the stated identity of your client which is completely and also very different affirming the stated identity of their client of the client is very different than affirming that someone happens to be attracted to the same sex right those are very different things then affirming the gender identity if you're not as a therapist your role isn't to affirm or to deny it's to listen right and to explore that's your that's your purpose in all your years of clinical therapy and all the patients that you ever sorry i'm sure i'm sure you saw dozens if not hundreds of gay patients did you ever meet a gay man who successfully de-gayed and then went on to live a completely functioning life no i did have a client who was questioning who went the heterosexual route yeah um he was questioning under some duress because he was the target of somewhat unwanted amorous affections by a fairly persistent gay gentleman who and this person was i would say easily swayed and confused but that was the closest i'd ever seen to the situation that you're describing now this conversion therapy issue is so now you as a therapist you're ethically and legally bound not to question the identity of your the stated identity of your client which to me is preposterous because all you ever do as a therapist is question identity that's the whole bloody that's the whole enterprise and you don't do it affirming or denying you really don't you do it as a as a questioner and a strategist but then we have the other conversion therapy which is surgical conversion and that's not only legal but opposing it has become a crime and so that's a form of insanity that that i just can i can just barely wrap my head around so so what do we do going back to the to the conservatives that were worried yeah that this is where we were going to end up to in in some sense i should probably be their greatest hero because it's like oh here's someone who wanted to enter civilized society wanted to affirm most of the long-fought time-tested ideals wanted to enter the world with those things help defend that world um it happens to be a little different than than we would think right okay it's it's two guys i can't deny it i should sort of be a hero to them it's it's not the ideal one that they went for but it's approximately close enough that this this should be pretty good i suppose that will be my challenge in life well maybe that but i also think that's probably true my suspicions are that when we release this discussion that the overwhelming majority of people will be sympathetic to your situation and i'm willing to to render harsh judgment and maybe that does exclude and we should get to this too some of the more fundamentalist religious types but you also said earlier that as far as you're concerned they also have a point there is a point okay so what's the point well there has to be a point there because look gay marriage was legalized i think at a federal level in the united states in 2015 if i'm not mistaken so that we're now seven years off of that and look at all of the craziness that has happened since i am not directly connecting it to that but when you change fundamental structures some weird things are going to happen this is again where i would lay most of the blame here i would lay on the sort of liberal establishment where nobody was willing to to defend anything and it's why the progressives basically were able to destroy everything the problem maybe comes is so we had this implicit idea which we've already discussed which is heterosexual monogamy long term faithful all of that good will that impossible ideal that people strive towards and there's a real boundary there right like a real boundary it's a man and a woman it's one man and one woman they're bound together over the course of their life the community supports that like it's a pretty definable box and then you say well we'll let the walls down and so we include single mothers and we include gay couples and it's like yeah but the wall's gone now so what else do you include and the answer is well we don't know and that's actually not a very good answer right because what happens is anyone who knocks can now come in and you think well that's great because we're being tolerant but the problem is well what happens when all the people in the room who are now invited in actually do not agree at all and so that any of this was ever good in the first place that's sort of that's what should be done because you can imagine now if you have a if you're dealing with a 10 year old boy who's who's or 11 year old boy let's say a little closer to puberty who's ambivalent about his sexual attraction and his sexual identity but also has a more feminine temperament which is not rare by the way because there's a lot of overlap between masculine feminine temperaments and now you have to decide well is this boy likely to be gay or is he trans and that's a hell of a decision to have to make especially when you can't actually have a real discussion about it the parents the parents can't and the clinician isn't allowed to say what they think or ask in essence yeah so and then and then especially when it's accompanied by the pressure which is a complete bloody lie that well if you don't let this kid transition right now all you're going to do is cause him more damage you're going to increase the risk of suicide which by the way i think is a claim that there is absolutely zero evidence for zero evidence for we just don't have even as the american psychological association admitted we have no good long-term follow-up data on the mental health of people who've transitioned over a reasonable period of time it just doesn't exist for obvious reasons it's only just started to happen right so probably in 10 years we'll have some beginnings of evidence of it and i have assuming assuming that we're in a situation where such evidence could be collected and discussed in anything approaching a rational and truly empirical fashion well as you know you know deborah so dr debra so who's a sex researcher i mean she was bringing up a lot of these issues and basically just pushed out of the field together well increasingly the scientific journals the scientific journals won't publish that sort of study and look they they they cut zucker off at the knees man they threw him out of camh he was the world's preeminent researcher in the field of gender dysphoria and he like i said he wasn't a political guy which is partly why they could go after him so easily so he sued the toronto star he sued the university of toronto newspaper and he sued camh he won all three lawsuits so then he has to spend most of his life suing places of journalism instead of doing the work he was seriously cancelled right and and that's a devastating for someone it's i would say it's equivalent being canceled in a serious sense is roughly equivalent to having a near fatal illness it is no bloody joke and so yeah so i don't know if we'll ever be able to gather the information we need to gather about such things so it seems to me what we're talking about here is with that ideal then what is what are the levers that we have for sort of judicious gatekeeping so that the single mother who really is doing her best will be welcomed into society or that the gay couple who wants to be part of what the ideal is will be welcomed in i don't know what all the firewalls are on that i think that's partly what the problem is right we don't have firewalls liberals put tolerance above everything in their hierarchy tolerance is the most important thing okay we've tolerated everything now now everyone's in the house between tolerance and carelessness is a very difficult one to establish and if you are careless especially in your conceptualization and perhaps in your actions the best mask for that carelessness is to proclaim yourself to be tolerant oh everything goes it's like well that's because you have zero discipline and you're you're and you're and no no ordered conceptualization of the world whatsoever because of your lack of discipline now you're going to pass on all off as a moral virtue and well we're definitely seeing the consequences of that especially in the trans issue i mean it's completely burst forth so that's why when people say the lgbtqi i don't even know what i'm not exactly sure what the q is i have no idea what the eye is as i said the tease as our friend douglas murray wrote in uh in his last book you know when he wrote his chapter on on the gays the l's and the and the g's the lesbians and the gays he separated that from the t chapter very effectively these things have nothing to do with each other and the more that we conflate these things the more that we're going to be unable to have any level of this conversation yeah in a functional manner well and the conflation is dangerous because the assumption is that you know the workers the students made the same erroneous assumption back in the 1960s when they allied themselves with such people as the hell's angels for example the student radicals it's like well we're all marginalized we all have that marxist oppression in common and that unites us and unite means that we're aiming for the same thing it's like well we found out at altamont that the hell's angels weren't exactly aiming at the same thing or or maybe they were you know in some nefarious manner so the mere fact that and it's it's also clearly the case that the more people that you aggregate on the margins and then it attempt to bring into the center the less likely you're going to get some homogeneous viewpoint and you might think well we don't need a homogeneous viewpoint but we certainly do if it comes to such things as surgical transformation of children who are more likely to be gay so then what do you think that what do you think my role in that could be or people like this conversation right because this is uncharted territory like you literally are in uncharted territory and your attitude is something like well i'm already deviating a lot from the norm and so maybe i should not deviate any more than i absolutely have to and i would also say that should apply to everyone yeah everyone's got their idiosyncrasies and thank god for that and we definitely need creative people and we even need some creative weirdos you know because god only knows when they'll come in handy but the rule of thumb should still be to the degree that you're able to uphold the norms and ideals of the collective society you have a moral obligation to do that you know i wrote in my first book and i think it was an idea i sort of morphed off saying peter thiel once said to me that uh that straight people spread the genes and gay people spread the memes meaning it's obvious the genes part is obvious how straight people multiply but gay people why did why did so much culture and art and music and so many interesting things about societies wherever gay people are why are the artists always living around the gay people why why is that the place where all all the kind of weirdos and marginal people are and then that creativity is burst forth from that so how do you combine those things how do you take that it might be you know so we know that that intense creativity is a trait right it's a temperamental trait so you can be very intelligent you can have a high iq and be low in creativity intelligence is a good predictor of creativity but they are somewhat separable so then the question is well what does what is creativity and some of it is mutable identity like a creative person the more creative you are the less you're the same from moment to moment hour to hour and day to day but almost by definition right you're a shape shifter and a changer a trickster and and the the the boundaries of conception that bound you are much looser if you're creative and so it's possible that like it's very difficult to account for homosexuality from a biological perspective right because you would assume that if anything was going to be disappear in the course of sequential reproduction the inability to reproduce would be at the time of mathematician right clearly clearly clearly and so what that has to mean it has to mean something like there are reproductive benefits to some of the factors that tilt towards homosexuality that are so powerful that they counterbalance the negative consequence of being able to unable to reproduce and it might be it might be that a fair bit of that manifests itself on the creativity side you know because create and i would say that the kids who are most likely to be we studied at harvard i never did publish this uh for a variety of reasons um when cutting and piercing first became popular um i was very curious about whether or not that was a marker for psychopathology right for for for the proclivity towards mental illness and before it became popular it was a subculture thing right it was carnies and circus types like marginal people prisoners it was a real subculture art form piercing and and body modification and then all of a sudden it went mainstream and the question is well who were was on the forefront of its introduction to popular culture so we studied a whole bunch of people this was very early on in that process to try to find out if they showed signs of mental illness or if it was a consequence of temperamental variability and what we saw was that there was no sign whatsoever that it was associated with mental illness it all loaded on openness so if you were more creative more mutable more able to shift shape let's say and perhaps more likely to and i don't know i don't think there's any data on this if if people who are high in openness are more likely to show some signs of same-sex similar attraction wouldn't surprise me at least because it sort of sounds right well their conceptual boundaries are that the boundaries are thinner and more porous so it could easily be the case so it could be they oh if there is an overlap there with creativity that would explain the genetic tilt that would keep homosexuality in the population but it would also explain what does especially on the male homosexual front there does seem to be an axis of creativity there and so it is the case that well certainly at least by stereotypical reputation there is a higher proportion of gay people among the creative types than you would expect so so to go into really dangerous territory then if we haven't done it so far i mean does what you're saying right there sort of show you why they're going after kids right now so the the idea is they're going after kids because they're grooming them and i think a lot of people think that means they're grooming them for sex i'm not exactly sure that's right i think they're grooming them for something more perverse in a way if you want to hear the rest of my conversation with mr dave rubin please go to dailywireplus.com and become a member today thanks

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 842,529

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 75uuWtRrnJI

Length: 71min 29sec (4289 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022