Watch: Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh invoke Martians in wildly inaccurate rant against same-sex marriage

16 November 2022

Right-wing podcasters Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh are really upset over the United States Senate's passage of an amendment that required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriage. On Wednesday's edition of The Ben Shapiro Show on The Daily Wire, the two men discussed why religion is not the only reason to oppose legal unions between two people of the same gender.

But neither of them actually made a case outside of accusing "liberals" of trying to box "conservatives" into a corner over the issue. Instead, the pair bantered about why they believe that marriage is essential to procreation, which it is not, and why supporters of marriage equality are endangering the future of the human species.

Shapiro:

Yeah I mean, one of the things that they're pretending this bill does is 'protect religious institutions from having to celebrate or solemnize a same-sex marriage.' Religious liberty already protects that under the Constitution of the United States. Instead, it apparently adds a rule of construction, saying the bill by itself would not deny tax-exempt status licensing, grants, and contracts 'not arising from a marriage.' But it doesn't do anything to actually address the problem with this particular issue.

I mean, it's a really poorly-written amendment by [Senator] Mitt Romney [R-Utah], particularly [Senator] Susan Collins [R-Maine] as well. There's another amendment that's been proposed to this called the First Amendment Defense Act – proposed by [Senator] Mike Lee [R-Utah] – I noticed they're not voting on that. But putting aside the rule of construction, the thing that's really amazing to me is that it is now, apparently, the law of the land and societal rule that the only rationale that you could possibly have for saying that a marriage is between a man and a woman is because you're a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim. That's really the only reason at all. That the only reason – we'll allow you to have these crazy beliefs so long as you can show that they're crazy beliefs, so long as you can show that the reason you believe a marriage is between a man and a woman is because you read it in a book, and because you really believe the book – they keep saying sincere religious belief. I don't even know how you measure sincere religious belief. Are we going to, like, now monitor how often you go to church, or to synagogue, or whether you keep Kosher, or whether you take communion in order to determine your sincere –

I mean, the same media that declares that [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi [D-California] is a sincere religious believer who's just for the mass abortion of unborn children, will then declare that you, Matt Walsh, are not actively in favor of the things that you're in favor of, you're just a religious bigot. You're a bigot, right? And your religion is a cover for your bigotry.

I'm highly annoyed by the constant derogation of non-religious arguments into religious arguments. This is what the left loves to do. They like to say you're pro-life, the reason you're pro-life is because of your crazy religion. And so, maybe we can respect your crazy religion along -- that is not the argument for marriage.

The argument for marriage has literally nothing to do with religion. You could be a visitor from Mars and you could see that all of human procreation relies on man, woman, child. This is not particularly difficult stuff. By essentially boxing in the argument in favor of traditional marriage into, 'well, you're a crazy religious believer, maybe we'll let you have that, but if you're a cake baker, then, we're not sure about that,' right? I mean like, 'we're not sure how far this religious liberty thing extends.'

What you're really doing is you're setting the ground game at same-sex marriage and traditional marriage are completely the same thing, and if you object to it, the only reason that we'll allow you to do that is because of this crazy thing called religion.

Walsh took the discussion even further astray, declaring – falsely – that the Republican definition of marriage has been the norm throughout human history:

Yeah I mean this is always the point I'm trying to get across to people is that you listen to these arguments – whether it's an argument about marriage, it's an argument about abortion, when life beings, even arguments about the definition of man and woman – listen to the argument between a conservative and a liberal and what you're gonna find is that religion almost always comes into play. Someone's gonna mention the Bible. But, but, almost always it's the person on the left who's bringing the into the conversation, because, as you point out, that's, that's, that's the framework they want us to adopt for the argument. That's sort of like the ground on which they wanna have this battle. They want to pretend that the only reason we would believe the things we believe and say what we're saying is because we've been told by our religion and we have no reasons outside of that.

That of course, that is totally illogical. It doesn't make any sense. And also when it comes to marriage, I mean, there's a reason why – it's not just Christian society, it's not just Jewish people that have said that marriage is a fundamentally procreative union between a man and a woman – you look at every society in human history and they have come down to that conclusion. I mean, there isn't any society in history that had anything like same-sex marriage as we, as we have today. And not every society has been Christian or Jewish. So this is a conclusion that all people through history have arrived at and it's not hard to see how they arrived at that conclusion. I mean, the, the – this is what I was trying to explain on Joe Rogan – it's the relationship between a man and a woman – that kind of relationship is just different in kind from any other sort of relationship and it has a capacity that none of these other relationships have. And that capacity makes it definitionally different, and it also makes that relationship more important to society that the other kinds of relationships because it has the capacity to create people, and so that means it has to be protected and actually respected in a way that no other relationship really has to be.

Back in March, Live Science debunked those claims in an extensive analysis of nuptials throughout various societies, pointing out that "though marriage has ancient roots, until recently love had little to do with it."

The piece even directly refuted what Walsh said on Shapiro's podcast:

In many early cultures, men could dissolve a marriage or take another wife if a woman was infertile. However, the early Christian church was a trailblazer in arguing that marriage was not contingent on producing offspring.

Other sources confirm what Live Science wrote. You can view them here, here, and here.

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

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