I'm currently sitting in my study trying to catch up on the week's journal entries that I didn't do, but I just finished an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast with Matt Walsh and wanted to record some thoughts while they were on my mind.
This was Matt's first time on Rogan's show, but I hope it won't be the last. It went for 3+ hours, as is typical. It's not necessary to wax poetic about why Rogan's show and others like it are popular, but the length of each episode is one of those reasons. Extended conversation will always be better than soundbite conversation.
The episode was split between two topics of conversation: Matt's What Is A Woman documentary and gay marriage. They found much common ground on the issues highlighted in the film, but the last half of the episode became tiresome during the discussion on gay marriage.
Matt Walsh, a devout Catholic, spent the entire time attempting to defend his positions without citing his religious beliefs. I understand why... In almost any argument these days, as soon as you use religion as support for your position, your opponent immediately says "That's just your subjective opinion." But because of his hesitance to go there, the last hour of the conversation turned into one big circle.
Joe asked a few good questions about Matt's use of the definitional argument, but most of them required him to use individual circumstances as evidence to create a general and societal expectation, and that's just not how this works. For example, Matt's biggest contention is that definitionally, marriage has always been marriage primarily because of it's procreative purpose, meaning that a homosexual marriage could no longer sustain that definition. Joe's counter argument: "What about heterosexual married couples that are infertile? Is their marriage illegitimate?"
That's how the entire second half of the conversation went, but that's not my biggest complaint of the episode. Though I understand Matt's hesitancy to bring up his theology to support his position and though he did get some opportunities to talk about it, I wish he would have done it sooner. I'm all for making the argument for something without using faith because in a lot of cases, it can be done. But we also need to learn how to stand on what we believe and why we believe it and just let that be enough. If Christ is King, just saying "Because He said so" is enough.