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Different views of homosexual sex by demographics (Democrats)

Ethan Strauss has a post up, On Forcing Enemies to Fake Their Beliefs – Why does the sports media want Tampa Bay Rays players to pretend they’re supportive of Pride?, where he comments on the fact that the push in corporate sports to be socially progressive is being driven by college-educated white staff, and probably in contradiction to the personal views of most players. Strauss is a former sports reporter, and he knows these sorts of guys personally, so he’s almost certainly correct.

Impressionistically it does seem that young white liberals sometimes forget that not everyone is at the same point on social issues.

To test that out, I decided to look at the HOMOSEX variable for 2018-2022. Do people think homosexual sex is wrong? And if so, who?

First, let’s look at white non-Hispanics.

Though conservative whites are split, liberal whites are almost totally in agreement that homosexual sex is not wrong at all (the residual are generally very old if you use the COHORT variable).

How bout black Americans? The same size is smaller, so I decided to just look at ideology.

Self-described liberal blacks are only somewhat more liberal on homosexual sex than non-Hispanic white conservatives.

Let’s compare black Democrats to white Democrats.

Black Democrats basically have the same views as conservative non-Hispanic whites. The contrast with college-educated white Democrats is pretty striking.

18 thoughts on “Different views of homosexual sex by demographics (Democrats)

  1. Unfortunately its only the views of the college educated white liberals that matter. They are the elite. They dominate politics, media, entertainment, business and education. Other demographics will fall in line, if not this generation, then surely the next. Any remotely ambitious Black, Hispanic or Asian kid will adopt the worldview of the liberal whites, not the worldview of their “socially conservative” parents. Spreads from there to the rest of cohort.

    Trickle Down might not work for economics but it definetely works for culture.

  2. To add, adding an age-control didn’t seem to change things too much.

    Elite sports players might have some divergence as a subgroup, as they’re probably socialized a little into a different background than their demographic average. It’s weird that in the UK, the England team, even those who were not black, was into ‘bending the knee’ when people of their social background and ethnicity generally would not be into ‘bending the knee’. But there are perhaps social reasons for this.

  3. @Harry, well, kind of seems to me like ‘Wokeness’ flowed “up” from radical Black college students in the US into the White college educated progressives. Their views mattered! Kendi’s views mattered! Angela Davis’s views mattered! Their views still matter, and direct the flow and shape of denunciation. It’s not like some elite White college students are just inventing this stuff whole cloth to block people out and protect their position – they were pressured into it by an establishment that was supine about standing up for them, and by radical minority group activism (including Asians, Hispanics, etc to a lesser extent I think) hungry for institutional status and success. They’re not just denouncing each other. People get pressure on them to be threatened with denunciation by ruthless, hungry, ambitious people who want their “spots” in the social order, they become more-Catholic-than-the-Pope about that ideology to utterly protect themselves. (Like we could imagine that long term successful capitalist families often probably became more ideologically zealous about communism – self protection.)

  4. Elite sports players might have some divergence as a subgroup, as they’re probably socialized a little into a different background than their demographic average.

    no. talk to some sports reporters.

  5. Like, is there any income effect on this stuff? There’s that model that as people / places become richer they tend to more social liberalism.

  6. Like, is there any income effect on this stuff? There’s that model that as people / places become richer they tend to more social liberalism.

    these are not ppl who get wealthy through patronage, credentials or social networks of validation and affirmation. so i think the liberalism part is attenuated. professional athletes are literal meritocrats in a way that’s hard to find equivalents elsewhere (perhaps research 1 physicists)

  7. Could be some direct income effect too – in theory, it’s income->less focus on survival->more self expression values, and direct social exposure to rich people who’ve got that way through education.

    But I guess on the other hand, locker room culture could cut the opposite way. So maybe, yeah, short of asking them directly, as I guess the reporter in this case did, the simple demographic is just the best possible good grounding.

    (There are maybe some other data on this – https://www.prri.org/research/americans-support-for-key-lgbtq-rights-continues-to-tick-upward/ – has “Though still a majority, Black Americans are the least likely to support same-sex marriage (59%)” and their Black Protestant subset on 55%, but it still is on the same neck of the woods).

  8. Matt: “Bend the knee” in what way? Was there some gay pride celebration in England that I missed?

    On race, I would expect whites who have worked and socialized with a lot of blacks to be more liberal on race, so not an apples to apples comparison.

  9. Also, what _is_ the English white working class view on homosexuality? Being a less fundamentalist Christian country than the US, I’d expect them to be more accepting than their American counterparts.

  10. “Bend the Knee” to Black Lives Matter. In general the white members of England team’s performance on it seemed a bit out of step with what would generally be expected from their class and background. It’s more the general idea that the particular circumstances can drift groups away from the demographic expectation, though in case there’s the issue that they have Black players in the team, and so on. Though I think in this case the demographic probably is the best baseline assumption (plus the reporter actually talked to them!) – it’s harder to see anything in this case that would push it away.

    I haven’t been able to find any decent survey data on ideas about homosexuality by class in the UK – BSA survey didn’t bother to ask. Generally what you say sounds intuitively likely to me.

  11. Yeah, I’m not surprised that white athletes who are teammates and friends with black athletes are perfectly fine with BLM. I think you’d find that to be true in the US as well.

    And how is any of this “bending the knee” anyway?

  12. They call it “taking the knee”, I just find it funnier and more in tune with the gesture of submission that it represents to call it “bending the knee”.

  13. Elite white progressives adopt opinions for two reasons.

    1. They are shibboleths that mark them as elite and more enlightened and more moral than the opinions held by the masses. Homosexual conduct is perfect. In most societies it is confined to small subgroups, after all, it adds little to reproductive fitness. It is sort of like expressing a fondness for eating snails.

    2. They are stealing the crown of thorns from African Americans. The sufferings of slavery and Jim Crow are obvious and give the African American descendants of those people immense moral capital in renegotiating the terms of the social contract in modern America. The response of homosexual activists was to grab some of that capital by claiming that the sufferings of homosexuals in previous generations whom they neither knew nor are descended from give them a similar status. They also claim that any attitude towards them other than worshipful adoration is discrimination like that suffered by African Americans in the Jim Crow South.

    Of course these political moves are unstable. Enact same sex marriage and receive openly homosexual persons in polite society and the power of the move is gone. They must press on. Transgenderism and Drag Queen Story hour are the new frontier. If they are accepted, it will be on to scenes from Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the North American Man Boy Love Association*.

    *There really is such a thing. Google it.

  14. @Walter, I think the situation with the gays, and why there’s the support for frontier pushing, I’d offer a possible guess that it seems perhaps kind of most analogous to the situation with Ashkenazi Jews.

    That is, outwardly, for both groups their culture is heavily feted by all comers across society, and you will see nothing more celebrated… and for the case both they’re also a relatively successful group, in terms of what you see as representation in the arts, in finance, in the sciences and the income they have (though for the gays, particularly academic outcomes outpace income). For the gays, maybe sometimes less than the straights who have supportive stay-at-home spouses and fewer long term health problems and other drives and push to earn high incomes like supporting a family, but pretty successful. They gentrify, they don’t get gentrified. Success and achieving economic equality isn’t a major motivation towards activism for gays as such (e.g. on “merits”, at least as our PMC construes them, as academic outcomes and prestigious jobs and whatnot, they can probably get elect a Buttigieg or Varadkar, and so on, easier than African-Americans could get their guy in on pure “merits”, and without a compromise of a Barack H Obama who isn’t really from their historical community).

    But at the same time, like Jews, they have a strong fear of a future Holocaust against them, and this leads them to believe that they’ll be safest if they always push the envelope further left towards more tolerance. In the case of the Jews, mainly towards ethnic diversity (hence being among the biggest proponents as a social subculture of inviting the world – ‘More, more, more immigration!’), while in the case of the gays, to further and further mainstreaming of any and all sexual variation; “kink” and such.

    Any people who dissent from this also face strong community pressure to conform, because for them it seems to be an existential matter, and also for the gays there is a lack of family bonds, which mean that people can be excommunicated from the community (communities built only on shared identity, ideology and friendship and not blood are weak this way as everyone fears they can be cast out). So that means very few gays will break from the tendency.

    (This is actually also partly why I’m by intuition a bit cautious about the gay anti-Wokes. Razib has proffered up in the past that the anti-Woke/Dark Enlightement types tend to be disagreeable, in order not to conform, and at times I think this can shade into sociopathy (a disregard for truth and honesty and enormous self-regard) when it is breaking from these very strong community pressures. And this group has particularly strong pressures. Especially that I have some doubt about those lesbian anti-Wokes who come from a radical feminist background, which is a movement that seems to positively select for Borderline Personality Disorder and Machiavellianism from the off, and for receptiveness to a very weird ideology.)

  15. More to my point:

    “The Myth of Ideological Polarization ‘Left’ and ‘right’ are illusory categories: What we’re really experiencing is tribal hostility” By Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis on June 17, 2022
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ideological-polarization-spectrum-myth-right-left-elon-musk-woke-11655481615
    The authors have written “The Myth of Left and Right,” forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
    * * *

    “The left-right model ignores that politics is about many issues. Like every other realm of life, it is multidimensional, yet we describe it using a graph with only one dimension. It’s true that many Americans hold their views in packages that we call “liberal” and “conservative”—those who currently support abortion rights, for instance, are also more likely to support vaccinations, income-tax increases, free trade and military intervention in Ukraine. But the question is why. Why is there a strong correlation between these seemingly unrelated issues, and why do we find them clustering in patterns that are predictable and binary instead of completely random and pluralistic?

    “The answer is socialization. When the Democratic and Republican parties change (as they have many times), the content and meaning of their ideologies change, too, meaning that ideologues (“liberals” and “conservatives”) will change their views to stay in line with their political tribe. Social conformity, not philosophy, explains their beliefs. Those who refuse to conform and maintain their political views independent of tribe will appear to have “switched” groups—even though they stayed consistent while the ideologies changed around them.

    “Political scientists sometimes call the increasing anger between the parties “affective polarization,” but we would be better off just calling it increased hostility. The term “polarization” confuses the matter by suggesting that the parties have moved toward fixed ideological poles. Yes, partisans are increasingly angry, tribal and isolated in media echo chambers. But to attribute this to positions on a mythical left-right spectrum misunderstands our politics entirely. Although America has two dominant ideological tribes, there is nothing uniting all of the positions of either side. The parties have coalesced around the concepts of “left” and “right,” but the concepts themselves are fictions. …”

  16. @Walter Sobchak: “It is sort of like expressing a fondness for eating snails.”

    Being from a country and region (southern Portugal) where snails are perhaps the most popular spring/summer dish and the woke position is “snails are sentient beings and should no be boiled alive!”, that passage sounded so strange… (probably like the western vegan vs. meat-eating ideological polarization could sound strange to an Indian)

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