‘Toxic Masculinity’ Has Slowed Australia’s March to Same-Sex Marriagebr Second, and this is true in the United States and in Australia, it used to be the casebr that the vast majority of gay and lesbian people were in the closet, so people were thinking about gay rights as an abstraction.br But one of the things we’ve learned in the last 10 years as various countries have come to advance gay rights — and I’ve written about this — isbr that half of the countries in the globe that have legalized same-sex marriage have Catholic majorities or significant Catholic pluralities.br It ended up being a powerful engine for gay rights because for a long time when you said to Americans "gay rights," they flashed on the gay pride parade, on men in leatherbr and on "dykes on bikes." They flashed on people who wanted validation for what those other Americans saw as a transgressive lifestyle.br What surprises you about the way the same-sex marriage debate has played out in Australia — especially consideringbr that Australia is one of the last holdouts among English-speaking democracies to legalize it?br Now, pretty much everywhere — I know this to be true in Australia without knowing much about the country — it’s a generational matter.br First, too much change, too quickly, frightens people — and I don’t think this is true just of Americans.