By Francesca Luberti, Khandis Blake, and Robert Brooks
New research reveals that religious beliefs and homophobia can be driven by conservative attitudes to sex
Australians are still divided in their attitudes towards gay marriage and gay rights. Although most voted to legalise gay marriage in the 2017 plebiscite, over one third of Australians voted against it.
The recent controversy surrounding rugby player Israel Folau’s comments on homosexuality has brought this division to the fore again, with Folau’s supporters framing it as an issue of religious freedom and free speech.
Some social theories argue that socializing agents such as religion and its morality can lead to homophobia. However, recent scientific evidence shows that underlying sexual conservatism may in fact cause some people to embrace religious devoutness and homophobia.
So much so that, in general, a person’s preference for monogamy and sexual conservatism is a better predictor of religious service attendance than any other personality or demographic traits.
As the Australian government works on a Religious Discrimination Bill and Israel Folau continues his legal battle against Rugby Australia, religious Australians maintain their view that it is their right to hold and express anti-gay beliefs.
Religion and homophobia promote sexually conservative norms and traditional values that reflect the reproductive interests of sexually conservative people. These include interests like high fertility, life-long monogamous marriage and traditional gender roles.
However, people’s religiosity is not fixed and individuals sometimes change their beliefs when they encounter changed circumstances.
Several scientific experiments have shown that when cues in the environment about sex and romantic relationships change – like information about weddings, sexual relationships or romantic competitors in the local area – people shift their attitudes about a variety of sexual topics, including homosexuality.
If the dating environment changes, this can cause people to become more sexually permissive or restrictive. For example, when study participants believe that many attractive people of their same sex are competing with them for dating partners, they report higher religiosity than participants exposed to plentiful attractive potential partners of the opposite sex, or participants given no information about their dating environment.
People with attractive competitors become more religious because religiosity promotes monogamy and fidelity, preventing the attractive people from monopolising available mates.
Sexually conservative people are more likely to oppose gay marriage and gay rights than more sexually liberal people and this becomes especially true in conservatives who associate homosexuality with promiscuity.
However, a study at UCLA showed that sexually conservative people’s opposition to gay marriage decreased when participants were told that gay men are not stereotypically promiscuous.
Our own preliminary research extends these findings and provides some interesting insight into the opposition to gay marriage.
We ran two experiments and collected data from 1,298 American and Australian participants through online recruitment platforms including Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Microworkers, the SONA system and Twitter.
All participants declared they were between 18 and 70-years-old, American or Australian residents, and fluent in English. We primed the participants with information on heterosexual or homosexual promiscuity in experiment 1, and homosexual or heterosexual weddings in experiment 2.
To measure participants’ sexual openness, we asked them to rate their agreement with statements such as ‘I can imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying casual sex with different partners.’
We were also interested in understanding whether our participants considered sexual relationships to be precious and valuable, and asked them to rate their agreement with statements such as ‘Weddings should be big and expensive to celebrate a couple’s love for each other.’
Finally, we measured participants’ agreement with the opposition to gay marriage through statements such as ‘Same-sex marriage undermines the meaning of the traditional family.’
We found a negative relationship between sexual openness and a preference for ‘valuable’ relationships, as well as the opposition to gay marriage.
Sexually conservative people are not only more opposed to gay marriage than sexually liberal people, they also prefer sexual relationships to appear rare, valuable, and expensive. For example, sexually conservative people like big and expensive weddings more so than sexually liberal people.
We also find that, on average, men are more opposed to gay marriage than women. They also like sexual relationships to appear rare, valuable and precious. The men in our study, on average, preferred big weddings and other expensive romantic rituals more so than women.
Interestingly, unlike the previous research study at UCLA, we found that priming participants with information about promiscuity or fidelity among homosexual or heterosexual people had no effects on their opposition to gay marriage.
However, we did find that sexually conservative people’s and men’s attitudes towards gay marriage shift when they are told about the size and scale of homosexual or heterosexual weddings that are currently fashionable. Men’s opposition to gay marriage decreases if they are told that other people, gay or straight, look forward to planning big and elaborate weddings, rather than cheap weddings.
Sexually conservative people’s opposition to gay marriage similarly decreases when they are exposed to gay weddings rather than heterosexual weddings, regardless of the weddings being big or modest.
Overall, this evidence suggests that people’s sexual attitudes may drive the opposition to gay marriage and discrimination against sexual minorities. However, this discrimination can decrease depending on what people believe about others’ sexual relationships.
From families torn apart by a member’s sexuality to public condemnation and bullying, negative attitudes concerning homosexuality can cause considerable harm. The same-sex marriage debate and the brewing controversy over freedom of religious speech have evoked strong emotions, and there is a sense that having to air the issues might only add to the pain.
Our research is motivated by an optimistic belief that a fuller understanding of the genesis of attitudes, and the underlying reasons for ideological conflict, can provide valuable tools to help decrease discrimination and political polarization.
In order to extend the reach of our research and bring more evidence-based analysis to this conversation we have set up a campaign on Everyday Hero.
FEATURED
Francesca Luberti, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW
Dr Khandis Blake, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne
Professor Robert Brooks, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW
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