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Focusing the family: the rhetorical construction of "family values" in contemporary cultural politics

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Focusing the family: the rhetorical construction of "family values" in contemporary cultural politics

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Content FOCUSING THE FAMILY: THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF “FAMILY VALUES” IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL POLITICS by Carrie Anne Platt ____________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Carrie Anne Platt ii Epigraph “The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life.” - Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style “The 21 st -century culture war’s battle line will be neither racial nor national; it will be ideological, with the definition of family as the ultimate prize.” - Jerry Gramckow, Focus on the Family iii Dedication To my grandparents, Clair and Toni Moody, for teaching me that critique and compassion should walk hand in hand. iv Acknowledgments If we agree that it takes a village to raise a child, then it should come as no surprise that it takes the attention and effort of many people to produce a dissertation. I was fortunate to have several scholarly “parents” attending to this project. Their support, insights, and encouragement have contributed greatly to its development. I would first like to acknowledge my advisor, Sarah Banet-Weiser. Working with her has been nothing short of a doctoral student’s dream come true. She gave me the guidance, support, and encouragement I needed to survive the academic job search, and provided both the carrots and the sticks that I needed to finish my dissertation. Her text messages, sense of humor, and ability to put things in perspective did me a world of good, and her feedback greatly improved this project. She helped me to see the possibilities present in my work, and provided me with the insights – and the sources – necessary to realize them. I promise to return all the books I borrowed. I must also acknowledge the influence of Tom Goodnight, who has invested so much of himself in both my personal and professional success. I very much appreciate his enthusiasm for new ideas, interest in interdisciplinary work, and many contributions to the intellectual feast that is the USC Annenberg doctoral program. I have learned so much from him during my time at Annenberg, and will miss being able to drop by his office or drop in on his classes. But we’ll always have karaoke at Alta. v I would also like to acknowledge the other two members of my committee, whose external perspectives provided a valuable check on the academic tendency to assume a very specialized audience. Sincere thanks go to Larry Gross, whose encyclopedic knowledge of cultural events and the history of LGBT rights has never ceased to amaze me, and who continues to remind me of the importance of constantly contextualizing contemporary cultural politics. The evolution of my thoughts on same-sex marriage owe a great deal to his insistence that matters of culture, politics, and sexuality are rarely as simple as they seem at first glance, and that good writing requires a lot of footnotes. Sharon Hays has been a guiding force in this project since its humble beginnings as a research project proposal in her Sociology of Culture class. My work has benefited greatly from her thoughtful input. She read multiple versions of the project carefully and critically, and challenged me to rethink several key parts of my argument. She was also the professor who first convinced me of the importance of speaking to the people that we write about, and of writing in a way that is accessible to readers not just outside of my own field, but also outside of academia. I hope I have done so. My family, friends, and colleagues (particularly the doctoral students who served with me on the ACGSA Board during my time at USC Annenberg) deserve special recognition for providing me with the perfect ratio of encouragement and distraction. vi Finally, I must thank the one person who helped me the most during this writing process – my partner, Zoltan Majdik. He has been the ultimate “provider” these past few years, providing encouragement, empathy, synonyms, writing suggestions, citations, copyediting, building walks, transportation, meals, snacks, tea, and many a Starbucks vanilla latte. He has talked me through so many ideas and read through so many drafts that he deserves an editorial credit. And he did all of this while writing his own dissertation. He is an outstanding scholar and an even better person, and I couldn’t be more excited about embarking on our next adventure together. vii Table of Contents Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures ix Abstract x Chapter 1: Introduction 1 “Family Values” in Contemporary Cultural Politics 5 Theoretical Framework 11 Discourse, Power, and the Family 12 Disciplining the Family 15 Constructing the Innocent Child 20 Research Questions 25 The Debate Over Same-Sex Marriage 27 The Debate Over Media Decency 30 Methodology 34 Preview of Chapters 41 Chapter 2: Focus on Nostalgia 43 Constructing the Past Through Nostalgia 44 Constructing the Decline of the Traditional Family 55 Constructing the Decline of Popular Culture 60 Demystifying the Nostalgia of Family Values 70 Challenging Narratives of Decline in the Decency Debate 76 Forecasting the Future of Family Values 81 The Future of Family in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate 82 The Future of Decency in Broadcasting 88 Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Public Policy 94 Conclusion 97 Chapter 3: Focus on Moral Authority 98 Decency and Technologies of Moral Authority 99 Child Protectionism and the Media 102 Regulating (In)Decency 105 Moral Authority and “Family Friendly” Content 115 viii Moral Authority in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate 128 Misuses and Abuses of Moral Authority 130 Marriage, Moral Authority, and Child Protectionism 137 Conclusion 147 Chapter 4: Focus on Gender 149 Gender as Rhetorical Strategy 151 Essentialism in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate 154 Challenging Traditional Gender Roles 167 Contesting Gender Essentialism 170 Articulating Gender through Sexuality 174 Challenging Gender in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate 176 Gender Normalization in the Decency Debate 182 Gender Norms and “Family Friendly” Content 186 Conclusion 193 Chapter 5: Conclusion 196 Summary of Chapters 199 Contribution of Research 206 Bibliography 210 ix List of Figures Figure 3.1: Traffic-Light Rating System in PTC’s Family Guide to TV 124 Figure 3.2: Human Rights Campaign’s “Family Portrait” 145 Figure 4.1: Family Research Council's “Father's Day” Ad for California 161 x Abstract This dissertation explores the evolving use of “family values” as a warrant for the enactment of social policy or censorship in contemporary debates over same-sex marriage and media decency. It argues that “family values” should be read as a multi-faceted ideograph, one that has been focused and refocused by activists in response to specific rhetorical situations, in order to highlight and/or conceal particular ideological facets. The dissertation examines three major ideological facets of “family values”: nostalgia, moral authority, and gender, analyzing how these emphases are constructed and contested by opponents of same-sex marriage, decency crusaders, LGBT rights groups, and anti-censorship activists. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction “Family values” has been cited as the antidote to a vast array of social ills – from poor academic performance to race-related violence. Proponents of the perpetually endangered “family dinner” often cite a National Merit Scholarship Corporation study that attributed the exceptional test scores of scholarship recipients to the frequency with which they ate meals as a family. In a now infamous 1992 speech, Vice President Dan Quayle blamed the Los Angeles riots on the participants’ lack of family values, suggesting that a renewed commitment to the family would overcome any racial or economic inequities. 1 These examples illustrate two of the most significant features of the rhetoric of “family values”: first, the versatility of this argument, which seems to have something to say about almost every part of our culture, from the quotidian to the noteworthy; second, the abstract and often mythic nature of the argument, which depends heavily on nostalgia and is often unconcerned with issues of historical fact. The National Merit study may be one of the best examples of the useful myth of family values, simply because the research never actually happened. When sociologist Barry Glasner asked the National Merit Scholarship Corporation about this research, which has been referenced by numerous parents groups, educational 1 Andrew Rosenthal, “After the Riots; Quayle Says Riots Sprang From Lack of Family Values,” New York Times, May 20, 1992, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D6143CF933 A15756C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 (accessed February 1, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xj94IEg2). 2 organizations, and cultural commentators, the NMSC replied that, while they had also seen references to the study, they had not conducted the research. 2 Furthermore, the family meal is not nearly as endangered as some social commentators have made it out to be. 75 percent of American families still eat dinner together five or more nights per week, which, as Glasner points out, is about the same percentage recorded in the 1950s. 3 But this inconvenient truth has not deterred family values advocates from lamenting the loss of the family meal, or blaming working mothers for its supposed decline. 4 In either case, truth matters less than effectiveness. It is harder to uncover an obvious fabrication like the NMSC study behind Vice President Quayle’s comments, but the nostalgic idealization of the past is much the same. As historian Stephanie Coontz and rhetorical critic Dana Cloud have both noted, the frequent use of nostalgia in the rhetoric of family values enables cultural commentators to ignore less-than-ideal pieces of American family history, while also obscuring the governmental support that made the economic and social stability of the 1950s United States possible. 5 In other words, by removing our current version of the “ideal family” from its historical context, we begin to see a stable social order as the result of rather than a contributing factor to family stability, and lose sight of the 2 Barry Glassner, The Gospel of Food: Everything You Know About Food is Wrong (New York: Ecco, 2007). 3 Ibid, 223. 4 See Laura Schlessinger, Stupid Things Parents Do To Mess Up Their Kids: Don’t Have Them If You Won’t Raise Them (New York: Harper Collins, 2000); Suzanne Venker, 7 Myths of Working Mothers: Why Children and (Most) Careers Just Don’t Mix (Dallas: Spence, 2004). 5 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 3 many ways in which structural factors – such as poverty or limited opportunity – strain and break apart American families. Social disorder is often attributed to the disorder of families simply because it is easier to advocate personal responsibility or adherence to “family values” than it is to enact meaningful structural change. This unidirectional link between American families and the strength of American society is evident in the discourse of contemporary social and religious conservatives. Many of these advocates argue that the fragmentation and conflict that characterize modern society are the direct result of the fragmentation and conflict characterizing the contemporary American family (cohabitation, divorce, absentee fathers, etc.). 6 Focus on the Family, one of the most prominent voices of Christian conservatism in the United States, takes the decline of the “traditional American family” as the starting point for an almost infinite number of “societal ills,” including sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted infections, abortion, cloning, euthanasia, gambling addiction, and pornography. 7 Due to their investment in and valorization of the “traditional family,” advocacy groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council bemoan the increase in nontraditional family structures, such as single parent families, blended families, adoptive families, and – most significantly – gay- and lesbian-headed families. 6 See Focus on the Family, “Marriage and Family Defense: Understanding the Issues that Affect Your Family,” http://www.family.org/socialissues/Marriage/ (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5U06t9q32). 7 Focus on the Family, “Social Issues: Understanding the Issues that Affect Your Family,” http://www.family.org/socialissues/ (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5Xj8bUDat). 4 Much ink has been spilled, in both the popular and scholarly press, over the rhetoric of “family values.” My initial interest in investigating the workings of this rhetoric came from what I perceived as an important paradox in how the discourse is understood by popular commentators and academics. It is described as meaningless drivel; vague, empty language; verbal fluff; or “mere rhetoric.” But it is also seen (both positively and negatively) as an all-powerful political trump card that will get any politician elected and any ballot issue passed. Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has referred to “family values” as “empty, politically driven rhetoric that has nothing to do with strengthening families and everything to do with electoral advantage.” 8 On the academic side, critical sociologist Judith Stacey has argued that the rhetoric of family values “provides an infinitely malleable symbolic resource that is understandably irresistible to politicians from both major parties.” 9 Both quotes describe a discourse that is both empty of meaning and absolutely persuasive. I take issue with both assessments. From a rhetorical perspective, the discourse of family values is constituted by specific strategies and concerns, recurring rhetorical facets that can be seen in many different sites of contemporary cultural politics. This project explores three of those facets – nostalgia, moral authority, and gender conservatism – and analyzes how they function in two different sites of cultural contestation: the same-sex marriage debate and the media decency debate. 8 E. J. Dionne Jr., “‘Family Values’ for All of Us,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2006, A23. 9 Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in a Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 100-101. 5 An investigation of how the rhetoric of family values is used in these debates reveals that it is not, as Judith Stacey argues, an “infinitely malleable” symbolic resource. Because it is purposefully abstract, the term can and does function across a wide variety of contexts and ideological positions. But it cannot be formed and reformed into any shape one wishes. Suggesting that the term can be deployed by anyone at any time for any reason obscures the truly rhetorical dimensions of “family values” discourse – the various ways in which the focus of the discourse has changed (and must continue to change) over time in response to concrete historical circumstances and varying cultural climates, and how it is constrained by these same conditions. “Family Values” in Contemporary Cultural Politics Previous research has documented the variety of cultural debates in which the rhetoric of “family values” has been deployed. Scholars from different traditions – social history, feminist theory, the sociology of culture, critical race theory, cultural studies, and queer theory – have explored how “family values” discourse has been invoked to alter public policy, 10 to discipline “aberrant” subjects, 11 or to stigmatize 10 Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 389; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 11 Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2004); Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 nontraditional family structures that fail to achieve the nuclear family ideal. 12 Dana Cloud, a rhetorician working in the critical tradition, has done an excellent job of analyzing the rhetorical use of “family values” in the 1992 presidential campaign, and she presents many persuasive explanations of why this discourse resonated with us, and why it continues to have such a powerful impact in contemporary American society. The current project builds on and is indebted to her conceptualization of “family values,” and her insistence on studying “family values” rhetorics in their historical and cultural contexts. Social historian Stephanie Coontz has dedicated a good portion of her work to dispelling the myths perpetuated about the history of the American family, particularly how “family values” works to conceal the impact of socioeconomic factors on family trends. 13 Coontz is also concerned with what she views as dangerous and over-simplistic observations on the decline of family, particularly those that emphasize morals at the expense of structural economic factors. 14 With a strong mix of historical and sociological research, she makes a compelling argument for the inevitability of complex family structures in a time of shifting values and increasing economic inequity. As a sociologist, Judith Stacey is also interested in documenting the material impact of “family values” discourse. According to Stacey, the “moralistic rhetoric deployed in the name of The Family has been fueling politics that harm rather than 12 Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 13 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 14 Ibid. 7 help actual families.” 15 Instead of accepting the diverse collection of real families that are actually impacted by public policy, she argues, we have clung to a moralistic and destructive ideology of The Family. Stacey’s most relevant contribution to the popular and academic conversation on the discourse of family is her own critical analysis of the rhetoric of “family values,” a criticism worth recounting at length. The ideal of the traditional family is a concept peculiar to the modern West, Stacey contends, noting that this discourse finds its most ardent expression in American culture: “While family support policies in the United States are the weakest in the industrial world, no society has yet to come close to our expenditure of politicized rhetoric over family values.” 16 Overlooking global trends toward non- traditional family structures, both conservatives and liberals view the decline of the traditional family as a quintessential American problem, and a threat to the assumed superiority of our society. 17 Different religious, ideological and political factions have tried to defend the traditional family by sheer rhetorical force. Conservative Christian groups – such as the Moral Majority, the Traditional Values Coalition, and Focus on the Family – are most often associated with this rhetoric, and the 1992 Republican Convention revolved around this theme. When Arkansas governor Bill Clinton defeated George Bush (Sr.) in the subsequent election, the shift in political power led to a shift in the rhetoric of family values. 15 Stacey, In the Name of the Family, 3. 16 Ibid, 47. 17 Stacey argues that the traditional family operates according to a Western imperialist logic, one that allowed colonialism to dominate the uncivilized other through revisions of native kinship structures. 8 According to Stacey, the revised rhetoric on family was overtly centrist, powered by influential academics from the social sciences instead of religious leaders, and explicitly post-feminist in tone. Capitalizing on the popular backlash toward political correctness and positioning themselves against the liberal cultural elites that wrote in favor of family diversity, these academics quickly formed a powerful network of policy institutes, think tanks, and commissions on the family. Marshalling social scientific evidence through “reciprocal citation practices,” these “cultural crusaders” created a new consensus on the social superiority of married, heterosexual parents living with their biological offspring, primarily by erasing the lack of scientific consensus on the social inferiority of other family forms. 18 Neo- liberals limited their scholarly support to the studies that most effectively rendered single parent families, divorced families, stepfamilies, gay and lesbian families, and other non-traditional families as “less than ideal” for both children and the social order. And, as Stacey points out early in her analysis of this social scientific stigma, it is just a “rhetorical baby step” from social inferiority to moral inferiority. 19 Cloud, Coontz, and Stacey have been some of the most prominent voices in the scholarly conversation over “family values.” However, in their attempts to expose the coercive and disciplinary power embedded in the term, they – like other scholars of “family values” – have limited the scope of their analysis to the use of “family values” discourse by conservatives, neglected to consider the limitations of 18 Stacey, In the Name of the Family, 60. 19 Ibid. 9 this tactic, and avoided analyzing the rare but significant occasions on which the all- powerful rhetoric of “family values” fails. The evolution of “family values” rhetoric in the same-sex marriage debate illustrates the importance of studying the discourse from multiple angles. On the one side, social and religious conservatives employ the rhetoric of “family values” to portray same-sex marriage as a threat to both children and the social order. On the other side of the debate, advocates of same-sex marriage and families dispute the assertion that same-sex marriage and gay or lesbian parents represent a threat to the institution of family, or to society at large. To the contrary, they argue, legalizing same-sex marriage would actually strengthen families in America (and American society) by providing both current and future gay and lesbian parents with the legal security enjoyed by heterosexual parents. 20 These advocates have actually appropriated the traditional “family values” argument – that the best families are headed by married parents, and that marriage benefits both children and the nation at large. 21 And gay and lesbian advocates are explicit about taking up this rhetoric. “We need to get over the belief that one particular group has a monopoly on family values,” says activist Betty DeGeneres, the first heterosexual spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, one of the 20 Human Rights Campaign, “Family Matters: Securing Equal Treatment under Federal Law for Same-Sex Couples and Our Children,” April 8, 2008, http://www.hrc.org/documents/Family_ Matters_brochure.pdf (accessed May 10, 2008, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XjHhztZ5). 21 See Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), or Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). 10 largest LGBT advocacy organizations in the United States, and a key voice in the same-sex marriage debate. 22 In order to break up the conservative monopoly on family values, proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage use concrete examples of gay and lesbian parents to argue that non-traditional families can also be “families of value.” Placing themselves in clear ideological opposition to groups like Focus on the Family, same-sex marriage advocates are nonetheless using similar rhetorical tactics to pursue their cause. They cite the welfare of children, both born and yet-to- be born, as their one of their primary concerns, a motivation that allows them to frame their position in the same terms used by their opponents. According to this logic, they fight for protections not just for themselves, but also for their children. 23 Both sides make connections between family practices and social order, both sides claim to conduct their crusades on behalf of children, and both sides support their arguments with a considerable amount of scientific research. But while same- sex marriage advocates may share certain motivations and rhetorical tactics with their conservative opponents, they have not achieved the same success. Forty-eight states have banned same-sex marriage through law or constitutional amendment, while twenty-six states have passed constitutional amendments that define marriage as the union between a woman and a man. Clearly, “family values” is not a sure-fire rhetorical tactic. It must be deployed in particular ways at particular times, and can 22 Human Rights Campaign, “History of National Coming Out Day: 1997: Super Mom,” http:// www.hrc.org/issues/3367.htm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5XjIFDVRj). 23 Robert A. Bernstein, Families of Value: Personal Profiles of Pioneering Lesbian and Gay Parents (New York: Marlowe and Company, 2005). 11 only be contested or appropriated to a certain extent. These opportunities and limitations are ripe for critical, historical, and especially rhetorical analysis. To that end, this project examines the rhetorical construction of family values in contemporary cultural politics, seeking an answer to the question of why the same rhetorical tactic (invoking the welfare of children and the strength of families) can bring consistent success to some advocates, while failing others. It pursues this question through the twin perspectives of cultural studies and rhetoric, using Foucault’s theory of discourse-power and Michael Calvin McGee’s theory of the ideograph to explore the discursive constructions of both the child and the family in contemporary American society. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of “family values” in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, it pursues a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what “family values” means in contemporary cultural politics. The term, while abstract and all encompassing on one level, is also a complex, multi-faceted symbol, which can be limited or enabled by various rhetorical situations and cultural climates. Theoretical Framework Michel Foucault’s writings on discourse-power and discursive formations provide a productive theoretical lens for examining the deployment of family values rhetoric in contemporary cultural politics, particularly the ways in which our public and private conversations about families work to construct or maintain unequal relations of power in American society. As Foucault writes in “The Order of 12 Discourse,” discourse and power are inseparable and mutually influential – power affects the formation of discourse, while discourse (re)constitutes power. 24 Discourse also constructs subjects, defining and producing the objects of our knowledge, and governing the way we can speak about and understand the world around us. These opportunities and constraints are particularly evident in how we understand families and children. The following sections will explore the discursive construction of “the family” and “the child,” two key components of the rhetoric of family values. Discourse, Power, and the Family Take the idea of the “traditional family,” one of the cornerstones of the rhetoric of family values. This family is as much an effect of discourse as it is an empirical phenomenon of married, heterosexual parents living with their biological children. It is the product of historically specific discourses of family, discourses that construct a timeless representation of the nuclear family as the “traditional” or “ideal family.” Viewing the traditional family through the lens of discursive power, the Foucaultian perspective is less concerned with what some commentators view as the objective “truth” of the matter (i.e., whether or not heterosexual nuclear family arrangements are in fact the best contexts for ensuring the mental and emotional well-being of children) and more interested in how the discursive construction of the 24 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Language and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 13 traditional family privileges that particular form of kinship, thereby pathologizing and disciplining “non-traditional families” for failing to measure up to this “norm.” One might legitimately question the rhetorical currency of a family values discourse based on the nuclear family structure, a form of kinship that is now in the minority in the United States. 25 After all, as the diversity of families has increased, more and more people have been excluded from the fixed definition of the “ideal family.” Ironically, the widening gap between the ideal and the real is precisely what gives the discourse of family values its disciplinary power. The rhetoric of “lack” is necessarily dependent upon the non-realization of the constructed ideal. If everyone grew up within the unproblematic nuclear family, no one would be able to invoke the logic of “family values” in response to social problems. Foucault’s distinction between sovereign and disciplinary power is particularly useful for understanding the rhetoric of lack and deficiency that often characterizes discourse on the family. Equating sovereign power with the law, Foucault argues that discipline enables power to extend its reach beyond the limits of the law by punishing not only those who break the rules, but also disciplining those who do not measure up to the standard: “What is specific to the disciplinary penalty is nonobservance, that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it,” he argues. “The whole indefinite domain of the nonconforming is punishable.” 26 25 Stacey, Brave New Families; Stacey, In the Name of the Family. 26 Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 194. 14 Thus, while the narrow construct of the ideal family allows us to imagine an almost indefinite spectrum of the “less than ideal,” the concrete instances of stigmatizing the “less than ideal” - “welfare queens,” black matriarchs, or gay parents, to name just a few – help to reconstitute the standard on which the practices of discipline are based. Finally, this theory of discourse-power provides us with a framework for examining both the possibilities and constraints inherent to discourse. According to Foucault, the defining characteristic of discourse formations is not the multitude of uses toward which a particular discourse can be put, but rather the “rules of appearance” that govern the conditions of its use: In this sense, discourse ceases to be what it is for the exegetic attitude: an inexhaustible treasure from which one can always draw new, and always unpredictable riches; a providence that has always spoken in advance, and which enables one to hear, when one knows how to listen, retrospective oracles; it appears as an asset – finite, limited, desirable, useful – that has its own rules of appearance, but also its own conditions of appropriation and operation; an asset that consequently, from the moment of its existence (and not only its “practical application”), poses the question of power; an asset that is, by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle. 27 By framing the appropriation and operation of such discourse in terms of a political struggle, we better understand the possibilities of reworking exclusionary discourses to reflect the growing diversity of American family life. Although the rhetoric of family values has been employed and deployed for different reasons, in different places, and at different times, the “conditions of its appropriation and operation” – who is allowed to speak “in the name of the family,” who is seen as possessing “family values,” and who is found “lacking” – always point to questions of power. 27 Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 15 Disciplining the Family Scholars in cultural studies, critical sociology, feminist studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and rhetoric, among others, have provided concrete historical and contemporary examples of how “family values” shifts responsibility from society to the individual, rendering the non-heterosexual, non-white, non-patriarchal, or non-middle class as “aberrant” subjects, 28 or as somehow complicit in their own subordinate status. In this way, the rhetoric of “family values” works to discipline or symbolically punish those outside the norm. In his historical study on the policing of families, critical scholar Jacques Donzelot argues that the valorization of the family that took place in the late 19th century was not the natural product of modernity, but rather the strategic result of philanthropic tactics that transformed the family from a collection of kin into a disciplined and disciplinary instrument. Calling attention to complex historical and socio-political influences, Donzelot documents how, in order to preserve liberal ideals of autonomy in post-revolutionary France, the family had to perform services that might have otherwise been provided by the state. The family thus became “a point of support for reabsorbing individuals for whom it had been inclined to relinquish responsibility.” 29 At the same time, privileging the institution of family in social life made families the major target of social policy. Families were regulated 28 Ferguson, Aberrations in Black. 29 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979): 58. 16 through charity, social work, education, and medicine, and mothers were transformed into agents of the state. In this way, “they could be made agents for conveying the norms of the state into the private sphere.” 30 Families were thus “policed” or disciplined in two different, but complementary ways: they were held responsible for the failings of their individual members, and charged with the task of disciplining these members according to current social norms. Social historians writing on the family remind us that the “traditional” nuclear family is neither timeless nor universal. Kinship structures change over time in response to specific historic shifts (from agrarian household economies to the nuclear family of modern industrial times, for example) and vary across cultures even today. 31 But while the everyday lived experiences of actual families have varied according to economic and other historical circumstances, as an ideological concept, “family” has been stable for over a century. 32 Contemporary American society is still holding on to a disciplinary discourse of the family, discourse that enables us to 30 Donzelot, The Policing of Families. 31 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962); Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life. (London: Verso, 1988); Coontz, The Way We Never Were; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden, 1951); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1977); Edward L. Kain, The Myth of Family Decline: Understanding Families in a World of Rapid Social Change (Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1990); Peter Laslett & Richard Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 32 Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London: Verso 1982). 17 simultaneously valorize an abstract ideal of the family, while punishing the real people who are unwilling or unable to live up to this ideal. Discourses of family still succeed in shifting the blame for social ills from the broader society onto individuals. The rhetoric of family values continues to work as “a vigorous agency of class placement and blame.” 33 And the idealization of the nuclear family still serves to obscure the fact that many families cannot afford an arrangement in which only one parent is working. 34 At the same time, rather than addressing the real structural conditions of economic inequality that lead to overworked parents and contribute to the disintegration of families, the rhetoric of family values urges those facing conditions of poverty to better their families, only to later blame their lack of economic or social mobility on their lack of family values. 35 Critical theorists and cultural historians like Ruth Feldstein, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Herman Gray have documented how notions of ethic difference and racial inferiority have been articulated through both conservative and neo-liberal rhetorics of family values. 36 The continued political and social ramifications of the Moynihan Report – released by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1965 – is just one 33 Ibid, 29. 34 Lillian B. Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America's Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity (New York: Harper, 1995). 35 Barrett and McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family. 36 Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Ferguson, Aberrations in Black; and Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 18 example of how the discourse of the “ideal family” has been used to scapegoat “black matriarchy” for problems afflicting the black community. 37 This report cites the decline of the black nuclear family – along with the corresponding rise in fatherless black youth – as both the greatest hindrance to economic equality and the primary cause of the violence, poverty, and other problems affecting urban blacks. While the Moynihan Report’s focus on black family structure did not ignore structural inequalities and discrimination – the report is, in fact, very explicit about the impact of racism – Moynihan’s research has been continually used to push for welfare reforms that limit the amount of assistance given to black families facing such problems today. 38 In both political and popular discourse, the lower-income black single mother has come to stand in for both the crumbling black family and the problems facing the black community, reinforcing the middle-class, white, and patriarchal aspects of the “ideal family.” 39 Queer theorist Roderick A. Ferguson takes the intersection between class, race, gender, and family values further. Critiquing classic works of sociology’s canon, Ferguson documents how disciplinary discourses 37 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, Office of Public Policy Planning and Research of the Department of Labor, 1965). For a more complete discussion of the rhetorical function of scapegoating, see Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 406; Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 15-20; and A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 19-23, and 252-267. 38 See Robert Rector, “Welfare Reform and the Healthy Marriage Initiative,” February 10, 2005, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/tst021005a.cfm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XjJb2GJm). 39 Gray, Cultural Moves, 24. 19 of sexuality are used to construct not just racial difference but racial inferiority, and to blame widespread poverty in the black community on blacks supposed inability to adhere to the norms of a heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family model. 40 These disciplinary tactics continue today in the public and institutional treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals, particularly when it comes the rearing of children, both biological and adopted. Non-heterosexual populations are routinely vilified by the assertion that they threaten the welfare of children. This argument enables social and religious conservatives to pursue what feminist scholar Lauren Berlant describes as hygienic governmentality: “a ruling bloc’s dramatic attempt to maintain its hegemony by asserting that an abject population threatens the common good and must be rigorously governed and monitored by all sectors of society.” 41 This governmentality informs a variety of policies, designed to “protect” children from gay and lesbian individuals conceiving them, adopting them, or even leading their scout troop. More often than not, these children exist only in the abstract. According to queer theorist Lee Edelman, the symbol of “the Child,” always understood as an innocent in need of protection, stands in for the future of humanity, a future that is under constant threat. 42 40 Ferguson, Aberrations in Black. 41 Lauren Berlant, “The Face of America and the State of Emergency,” in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996): 397. 42 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 20 Constructing the Innocent Child This trope of the child – which signifies both existing children and children who are not yet born – is a major component of the rhetoric of family values. 43 Just like the traditional family, “the child” is a discursive construct that has been created over time by specific relations of power and deployed for ideological purposes. In the introduction to The Children’s Culture Reader, cultural theorist Henry Jenkins challenges “the myth of childhood innocence,” 44 which assumes that “children exist in a space beyond, above, outside the political.” 45 Instead, as he points out, almost every major political battle of the twentieth century has been fought on the backs of our children, from the economic reforms of the Progressive Era (which sought to protect immigrant children from the sweatshop owners) and the social readjustments of the civil rights era (which often circulated around the images of black and white children playing together) to contemporary anxieties about the digital revolution (which often depict the wide-eyed child as subject to the corruption of cybersex and porn websites). The innocent child carries the rhetorical force of such arguments; we are constantly urged to take action to protect our children. 46 This construct of the child, as an innocent threatened by forces outside of the family, has become so naturalized and so dominant in contemporary society that it seems as if children have been this way from the very beginning of time. But the innocent 43 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 44 Henry Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1. 45 Ibid, 2. 46 Ibid. 21 child is a far more recent invention. Like many of the external “threats” that we seek to protect children from, it is product of modernity, industrialism, and capitalism. Historian Philippe Aries argues that our concept of “childhood” – as a space and time separated from adulthood – did not exist until at least the Middle Ages. 47 Before that time, children were treated as small, more dependent, adults. And they were expected to work and act as adults as soon as they were physically able to do so. Parents treated children and childhood with little to none of the reverence with which we regard it today. It was simply something to get past as quickly as possible. Aries traces the emergence of the “innocent child” to commercial capitalism, and the increased emphasis within the middle and upper classes on the education of their sons. 48 Children were seen as blank slates or empty vessels that needed to be filled with knowledge in preparation for their participation in the new economy. This new view of children, as naïve creatures with special needs, helped to construct the now common idea of childhood as a time of innocence, and altered the way that children were treated, both by their parents and by society at large. “The idea of childish innocence resulted in two kinds of attitude and behavior toward childhood,” writes Aries, “firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by life and particularly by the sexuality tolerated if not approved of among adults; and secondly, strengthening it by 47 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962). 48 Ibid. 22 developing character and reason.” 49 The innocence and vulnerability of children was then used, as it is now, to reform and regulate adult behavior. 50 It is important to note the difference between the psychological or emotional vulnerability of children discursively constructed by the pedagogical literature of the time, and the physical vulnerability of children. As historian Karin Calvert outlines in her work on the shifting cultural understanding of childhood in the United States, the physical vulnerability associated with childhood prior to the eighteenth century failed to provoke the same nostalgia that we express for the tenderness of childhood today. 51 Childhood was something akin to an illness; growing up meant “growing strong and gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take care of oneself.” 52 The influence of the Romantics at the beginning of the eighteenth century transformed childhood into a time of robust health, proximity to nature, and freedom from adult responsibilities. Children were encouraged to be “childish” and to refrain from conforming to adult expectations for as long as they could. The privileging of childhood innocence and urge to protect children intensified in the nineteenth century, when childhood was, as Calvert puts it, “imbued with an almost sacred character. Children were pure and innocent beings, descended from heaven and 49 Philippe Aries, “From Immodesty to Innocence,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 56. 50 Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths.” 51 Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). 52 Ibid, 150. 23 unsullied by worldly corruption.” 53 This discursive construction of the child served as a means for criticizing the fracturing of family and community by modernity. These changes coincided with what economist Viviana A. Zelizer describes as a “revaluing” of the child in American culture. 54 As Zelizer points out, in the pre- industrial cultures of the nineteenth century, child labor was commonplace. It was expected that children would work on the family farm or contribute to the family’s household economy. With the rise of the middle class, however, public disapproval of child labor mounted. New emphasis was placed on the child’s sentimental value, argues Zelizer, which helped make up for the loss of the child’s labor or wages. 55 With the physical well-being of the child newly assured, the focus of child advocates shifted to the psychological and social development of children. Numerous attacks on popular culture, which will be discussed in more detail throughout this project, were the result of this new understanding of the child as innocent and in need of protection from the outside world. “By evoking the ‘threat to children,’ social reformers typically justified their own position as cultural custodians,” Henry Jenkins and Lynn Spigel contend, “linking (either implicitly or explicitly) anxieties 53 Calvert, Children in the House, 152. 54 Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 55 Viviana A. Zelizer, “From Useful to Useless: Moral Conflict over Child Labor,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 81-94. 24 about violence, sexuality and morality to mandates of good taste and artistic merit.” 56 This cultural custodianship continues in today’s decency crusade. The discursive construction of the innocent child performs a lot of ideological labor, and stands in as a warrant for many public and political actions taken “in the name of the children.” At the same time, as James Kincaid notes, the useful myth of childhood innocence empties the child of his or her own political agency, so that he or she can be a better vessel for our own agendas. 57 The child must remain innocent and unknowing in order to fulfill its ideological function. As historian Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger says, “it is precisely because the young are untainted that the nation can willingly vest in them its best hopes.” 58 It also allows the figure of the child to stand in for a variety of ideological causes, even causes that conflict with one another, as we will see in the following chapters. But the “empty” or polysemic nature of the discursive figure of the child does not mean that it is unmarked by race, class, or gender. As Henry Jenkins argues in the introduction to The Children’s Culture Reader, “the most persistent image of the innocent child is that of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy,” such as the one who appeared on the cover of Time magazine’s issue on the Communications Decency 56 Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins, “Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory,” in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, ed. Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 127. 57 James Kincaid, “Producing Erotic Children,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 241-253. 58 Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger, “Children, Childhood and Change in America, 1820-1920,” in A Century of Childhood, ed. Mary L. S. Heininger, Karin Calvert, Barbara Finkelstein, Kathy Vandell, Anne Scoot MacLeod, and Harvey Green (Rochester, NY: Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984), 31. 25 Act, “and the markers of middle-classness, whiteness, and masculinity are read as standing for all children.” 59 This “universal child” is also held up as a model of desired innocence, against which the knowledge and behavior of nonwhite and working class children are often judged. Research Questions While normalizing discourses have a strong material effect on non-dominant populations, we must avoid the simplistic conclusion that only white, middle-to- upper class, heterosexual males privilege the innocence of children, or use the social construct of the nuclear family to pathologize the “other.” Dominant groups may attempt to claim “family values” as their own, but the discursive power of this normalizing discourse is not something that can be possessed and then mechanically imposed on less dominant groups. It certainly contributes to relations of oppression, but to understand the discourse of the family in terms of the singular oppressor and the multiple oppressed is to miss the complexity of power relations constituted by such discourse. We cannot ignore the fact that “family values” discourse is employed both toward and within oppressed communities. We need to be able to account for how this discourse can be both contested and articulated within different communities. A top-down, oppressive model of power that sees dominant groups possessing and enforcing the logic of family values on others will not suffice if we 59 Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” 13. 26 wish to understand the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which the rhetoric of family values operates. In the same way that we must avoid an overly simplistic, top-down model of oppression when analyzing exclusionary definitions of the family, we must also avoid the conclusion that the discourse of family values is always and in every case destructive. “Family values” can actually give an added sense of value to those who are otherwise devalued in society. Foucault’s understanding of power as productive reminds us that the discourse of family can also produce a positive political effect, especially in the current political climate. While it can be used to render aberrant subjects, it can also be used as a means of empowerment, as a way of gaining social power by aligning oneself with social groups that are more accepted in society. The current project pursues this broader understanding of family values, and, in doing so, seeks to answer the following research questions:  What are the primary facets of the rhetoric of “family values”?  How are these facets deployed and contested in the context of the same- sex marriage debate and the media decency debates?  How do activists and advocacy groups render these facets of “family values” more or less visible?  How have these activists altered their rhetorical strategies in response to specific rhetorical circumstances?  Why, in general, have conservative activists been more successful? 27 The Debate over Same-Sex Marriage Although the contemporary battle for LGBT rights can be traced back to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the debate over same-sex marriage has a much shorter history. Most accounts trace it back to 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that denying marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples violated the equal protection clause of the state Constitution. This ruling came in response to a lawsuit initiated against the state in 1991 by three same-sex couple who claimed they were denied marriage licenses because of their partner’s sex, therefore violating their right to equal protection under the law. A circuit court rejected this argument and found in favor of the state. The couples then appealed to the Hawaii Supreme Court, which vacated the lower court’s decision and instructed the state that it must demonstrate a “compelling interest” in prohibiting same-sex marriage. In 1996, another circuit court ruled that the state had not demonstrated compelling interest, and ordered the distribution of marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The state appealed this decision, but it was a moot point. In the 1998 midterm election, 68 percent of Hawaiians voted to amend the state Constitution, giving the legislature power to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. 60 The 1993 ruling in favor of same-sex marriage alarmed social and religious conservatives, setting off a wave of state-level initiatives and amendments intended to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage. The issue reached the federal level 60 Nina Wu, “Momentum Gaining for Same-Sex Marriage,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, June 29, 2008, http://starbulletin.com/2008/06/29/business/story03.html (accessed June 30, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Yz15xQao). 28 soon after. On September 21, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law. Drafted to prevent the legal recognition of same-sex marriages under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution, DOMA gives states the power to refuse legal recognition of marriages between partners of the same sex, even if that marriage is recognized by another state. It also defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman for the purpose of all federal law. 61 While there were advocacy groups and legislators who opposed DOMA, the act passed both houses of Congress easily, by a vote of 342 to 67 in the House of Representatives, and a vote of 85 to 14 in the Senate. Eight years and several landmark court decisions later, President George W. Bush called on Congress to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). Like DOMA, the Federal Marriage Amendment defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. But, as a constitutional amendment, it could not be struck down by what its supporters referred to as “activist courts.” 62 Perhaps most significantly, it would prevent the legal recognition of same-sex marriages by state and local governments. While supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act enjoyed an easy passage in 1996, the Federal Marriage Amendment failed in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. In the Senate, a cloture motion was defeated on July 13, 2004. 63 61 Defense of Marriage Act, H.R. 3396. 62 The White House, “President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage,” February 24, 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040224-2.html (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XjKJS3Dh). 63 A cloture motion ends debate and forces a vote on the House or Senate floor. 29 There were 50 votes in opposition and 48 in support, 12 votes short of the 60-vote supermajority needed to force a vote on the amendment, and 19 votes short of the 67-vote supermajority necessary for passage. The House took up the amendment on September 30, 2004. With only 227 votes in support and 186 in opposition, the amendment was 67 votes short of the 290 votes necessary for passage. But we must be wary of viewing the failure of the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, and the subsequent failure of the Marriage Protection Act in 2007, as key turning points in the debate over same-sex marriage. In the eight years since DOMA was signed into law, 48 states have enacted legal or constitutional bars on same-sex marriage. Massachusetts and California are currently the only states that allow same- sex couples to marry, and the issue of same-sex marriage in California is far from settled. 64 In a 4-3 ruling on May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to prohibit same-sex couples from marrying, and ordered the state to start distributing marriage licenses to same-sex couples starting June 16, 2008. This ruling struck down a 1977 state law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and overturned a 2000 proposition, passed by California voters, which prohibited the recognition of same-sex marriage by the state of California. 65 Hundreds of couples took this opportunity to get married, but the fate of 64 Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire provide legal protections to same-sex partners via “civil unions.” Oregon, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia offer same-sex couples a less comprehensive “domestic partnership.” 65 Maura Dolan, “California Supreme Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gaymarriage16-2008may16,0,6182317.story (accessed May 16, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YzUXoQOY). 30 same-sex marriage in California remains unclear. Californians for Marriage, a state- level affiliate of the Family Research Council, collected enough signatures to get a more permanent constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the November 2008 ballot. 66 California voters passed Proposition 22 by a considerable margin (61 percent in favor), but public opinion on the issue appears to be shifting. 67 It remains to be seen whether the legalization of same-sex marriage in California will lead to greater public acceptance, or galvanize the opposition. The Debate over Media Decency The debate over media decency has a significantly longer history than the same-sex marriage debate, a history that will be explored in greater detail in the third chapter. This project primarily focuses on the past few years of the media decency debate – after the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl halftime show put media (in)decency back on the public agenda – and the subsequent ascent of the Parents Television Council (PTC) as the nation’s most vocal media watchdog group. On June 15, 2006, Brent Bozell, founder of the Parents Television Council, and Tim Winters, the organization’s executive director, were both invited to the White House to witness the signing of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act into 66 Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Opponents of Gay Marriage See Hope in Ballot Measure,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-anti16-2008may16,0,7598579.story (accessed May 16, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YzUrQZC6). 67 Cathleen Decker, “Times Poll: Californians Narrowly Reject Gay Marriage,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-poll23-2008may23,0,2084360.story? (accessed May 23, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YzV0gq6r). 31 law. The PTC viewed this bill, which increased the FCC’s minimum fine for airing indecent content by tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000, 68 as a major victory for media decency crusaders. Their presence at the ceremony was also a sign of the increasing influence of the PTC on national media policy. The Parents Television Council was founded by conservative activist Bozell in 1995 as a response to what many decency activists viewed as the coarsening of television content. At first, the PTC focused primarily on broadcast television, particularly the programs aired during the former “family hour,” from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern/Pacific. Carefully tracking the sexual content, violence, and profanity in each program through recordings, transcriptions, and content analyses, PTC employees and volunteers assembled an archive of data on broadcast indecency. 69 This archive was gradually expanded to include programs broadcast outside of primetime and some popular cable shows that the organization found particularly offensive. The data gathered has been used to conduct and publish studies on media indecency, 70 68 The White House, “President Signs the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005,” June 15, 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060615-1.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXZWB2ni). 69 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council is Working to Help You and Your Family Make Better Viewing Decisions…What’s on TV for Your Family Tonight?” http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/familyguide/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5VXZoGhwk). 70 Parents Television Council, “PTC Special Reports,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/ reports/welcome.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5VXZwj2om). 32 lobby members of Congress to introduce or support decency-related laws, 71 and file complaints with the Federal Communications Commission. 72 On the homepage of their website, the Parents Television Council describes its basic mission as aiming “to ensure that children are not constantly assaulted by sex, violence and profanity on television and in other media.” 73 The PTC has come under fire in the past for the methods and rhetorical tactics it uses to support its various media decency campaigns. In 1999, the Parents Television Council launched a campaign against the World Wrestling Federation’s Smackdown!, which it described as “the most ultra-violent, foul-mouthed, and sexually explicit show on prime time television.” 74 The PTC contacted most of the scheduled advertisers before the show even aired, urging them not to sponsor the program. During the program’s run, the PTC sent every commercial sponsor copies of its research reports and clips highlighting the violence, profanity, and sexual content of Smackdown! PTC Founder Brent Bozell even claimed that the show was responsible for the deaths of several children, who died while trying to replicate the 71 Parents Television Council, “PTC Urges FCC and Congress to Listen to Consumers, Not Industry Lobbyists,” November 28, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2007/1128.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXa9L1FL). 72 Parents Television Council, “File an Official Indecency Complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Now,” https://www.parentstv.org/PTC/fcc/fcccomplaint.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXaJ324n). 73 Parents Television Council, “About Us,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/aboutus/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXZamJFz). 74 Parents Television Council, “PTC Takes Action Against TV’s Biggest Villain: World Wrestling Federation’s ‘WWF Smackdown’,” http://www.parentstv.org/AdvertisingInfo/WWFSmackdown1. html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXaTQ3Kr). 33 moves they saw on television. The World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE) sued the PTC for defamation and the unauthorized use of Smackdown! clips in the organization’s fundraising video, “National Campaign to Clean TV Up Now!” The PTC settled the case out of court and Bozell was forced to issue a public apology on the matter, in which he admitted his claim regarding the show’s responsibility for children’s deaths was unfounded. 75 But this setback did not stop the Parents Television Council from targeting specific entertainment companies or programs. The PTC is currently campaigning against three different F/X cable programs, Rescue Me, 76 Nip/Tuck, 77 and Dirt. 78 They have combined these campaigns into a larger push for “cable choice,” or allowing customers to purchase cable channels individually, a move that allows the PTC to take broader aim at the cable industry, which has traditionally relied on selling consumers bundled channels. The PTC believes that allowing parents to build their own cable packages, effectively opting-out of any and all channels they find 75 Paul Farhi, “TV Watchdog Apologizes for False Claims on Wrestling,” Washington Post, July 9, 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wpdyn/A41628-2002Jul8 (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXbXey92). 76 Parents Television Council, “‘Rescue Me’ Advertiser & Cable Choice Campaign,” http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/campaigns/rescueme/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXbkd8S2). 77 Parents Television Council, “Nip/Tuck: It’s Not MY Choice!” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/ campaigns/niptuck/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5VXc12dN7). 78 Parents Television Council, “‘Dirt’ Advertiser & Cable Choice Campaign,” http://www.parentstv. org/PTC/campaigns/dirt/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5VXcA9TW4). 34 offensive, will force providers to offer more family friendly programming in order to remain competitive. 79 When it comes to broadcast television, the PTC tends to rely on the threat of FCC fines. Knowing that the FCC cannot and does not monitor the entire television schedule, but instead relies on the complaints of groups and individual viewers to launch its investigations and level fines against offending stations, the Parents Television Council attempts to file as many FCC complaints as possible. Their success in filing these complaints has been unparalleled. In February 2004, the same month that Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” put media decency back on the public agenda, FCC chairman Michael Powell was called to testify before Congress. According to Powell, the FCC received more than 240,000 indecency complaints in 2003. He compared this figure to the 14,000 received in 2002, and the 350 received in 2001. According to Mediaweek estimates, 99.8% of the 240,000 complaints lodged in 2003 were filed by or through the PTC. 80 Methodology To study the use of “family values” rhetoric by activists in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, a multi-methodological approach including 79 Parents Television Council, “Cable Consumer Choice Campaign: Want the Disney Channel But Not MTV? Don’t Be Forced to Support Offensive Content. Choose Your Own Channels,” http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/cable/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5VXcGaPg6). 80 Todd Shields, “Activists Dominate Content Complaints,” Mediaweek, December 6, 2004, http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/news/2004/indecency_mediaweek.htm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXcYZsxN). 35 textual analysis, interviews, policy analysis, and social history was employed. Relevant web resources from the national conservative organizations Alliance for Marriage, Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, and the Traditional Values Coalition were downloaded and archived for textual analysis, along with relevant web resources published by Freedom to Marry, the Human Rights Campaign, and Lambda Legal. In addition, 40 weeks worth of electronic newsletters and updates were solicited from Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, and the Human Rights Campaign. Additional texts included books and articles published by these organizations, media appearances by spokespersons, and the August 2007 HRC- sponsored forum featuring the 2008 Democratic presidential hopefuls. For the decency debate, the Parents Television Council’s website was downloaded and archived for textual analysis. 40 weeks worth of the Parents Television Council’s E- Alerts were solicited and archived. Additional texts collected for analysis included recent studies conducted and published by the Parents Television Council, PTC press releases, media appearances by PTC spokespersons, and congressional testimony given by PTC founder Brent Bozell and current president Tim Winters. I also collected web resources and campaign materials from four state-level campaigns for or against same-sex marriage: Montanans for Marriage/For CI-96, Montanans for Families and Fairness/Against CI-96, Californians for Marriage, and Equality California. I selected Montana and California as local sites of analysis for comparison purposes. Both states had recently passed bans on same-sex marriage (Californians passed Proposition 22 in 2000, while Montanans passed Constitutional 36 Initiative 96 in 2004), but within the context of very different political and ideological climates. I was also able to conduct in-depth interviews with Montana- based activists involved in the CI-96 debate. Because the battle over same-sex marriage has been fought both in the courts and at the ballot box, the texts produced by the organizations listed above typically serve a dual function: they make a global argument in favor of (or in opposition to) same-sex marriage and teach individuals how to argue in favor of (or in opposition to) same-sex marriage in their local communities. Focus on the Family, for example, offers “Defending Marriage: Debate-Tested Sound Bites” on its website, 81 while the Human Rights Campaign provides rebuttals to the most common arguments against same-sex marriage. 82 These texts are particularly helpful for tracing the histories and trajectories of rhetorical strategy, as each talking point or sound bite tends to respond to a previous argument that has been advanced by the other side My textual analysis was grounded in the practice of ideographic criticism. Building on the work of critical theorist Dana Cloud, 83 this project conceives of “family values” as an ideograph, one of a variety of ordinary language terms found in public discourse, that “function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for 81 Glenn T. Stanton, “Defending Marriage: Debate-Tested Sound Bites,” Focus on the Family, http:// www.family.org/socialissues/A000001140.cfm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5XjJjc5mj). 82 Human Rights Campaign, “Questions about Same-Sex Marriage,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/5517. htm (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived athttp://www.webcitation.org/5XfqXhv5Z). 83 Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>” 37 behavior and belief,” 84 or as “ necessary motivations or justifications for action performed in the name of the public” 85 Common ideographs such as “equality,” “freedom,” or, more recently, “national security” are employed to warrant the use of power and justify various beliefs and actions. They are persuasive because they tend to be abstract (applicable in multiple contexts), familiar, and easy to identify with. Ideographic criticism was developed by rhetorical theorist and critic Michael Calvin McGee, who conceived of ideographs as “the basic structural elements, the building blocks, of ideology. Thus they may be thought of as ‘ideographs’ for, like Chinese symbols, they signify and ‘contain’ a unique ideological commitment […] ideographs are one-term sums of an orientation.” 86 According to McGee, the impetus to develop the concept came from his desire to engage ideology in a way that acknowledged the role of discourse and power in constructing human consciousness, but did not deny our human capacity to harness this power through the strategic use of symbols. 87 Dana Cloud sees ideographs and ideographic criticism as concepts that provide an analytical link between rhetoric – understood as situated, pragmatic, instrumental, and strategic discourse – on the one hand, and ideology – the structures or systems of ideas within which individuals pragmatic speech acts take place and by which they are constrained – on the other. 88 84 Michael Calvin McGee, “The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 6. 85 Celeste Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): xiii. 86 McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’,” 7. 87 Ibid. 88 Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>,” 389. 38 Ideographic analysis provides a link between rhetoric and ideology that attempts to account for both sides of this theoretical dilemma. In order to document how ideographs work in public argument, critics must move beyond the traditional practice of studying a single text, a single speaker, or a single era. 89 A concrete example may help to illustrate this shift. Many criticisms have been penned on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and many more have been written about Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The micro- rhetorical focus of these pieces may give us a more nuanced idea of what Lincoln meant by the term “liberty,” or what Dr. King was referencing when he invoked the ideographs of “freedom,” “justice,” and “equality” at the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963, but they cannot explain how each speech depends on the way that its key terms have evolved over time. As McGee would have us see it, the ideological and rhetorical character of an ideograph is not determined by the ideas that it represents at any given time, but rather “what it has meant and does mean as a usage.” 90 The power of the ideographs in both speeches (and the ideological work of the speeches themselves) depends heavily on how these terms have been contested, expanded, and constrained in use over time. This dimension is what McGee refers to as the “diachronic” aspect of the ideograph. 91 It also depends on how they relate to 89 McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’.” 90 Ibid, 9. 91 Ibid, 12. 39 the other ideographs prominent at that moment in history. McGee refers to these relationships as the “synchronic” dimensions of the ideograph. 92 Ideographic criticism provides the tools necessary for locating the term “family values” in its historical context and describing the cultural tensions and contradictions informing its usage at any given moment in time. The term “family values” is clearly an ideographic slogan – purposefully abstract, entirely familiar, and often used to justify the social policy (or the lack there of) that impacts real American families. Dana Cloud’s 1998 analysis of the rhetoric of “family values” is primarily concerned with the synchronic aspect of the ideograph. 93 Looking at the deployment of “family values” in the 1992 presidential campaigns, Cloud argues that both Republicans and Democrats defined “family values” by connecting the term with the ideographs of “independence,” “responsibility,” and “moral integrity,” while also privileging “family values” over “community,” financial “security,” and racial or gender “equality.” This rhetorical positioning of the ideograph functioned to scapegoat poor and nonwhite populations by making structural problems like racism and chronic poverty appear as moral failures on the part of the individuals who were most harmed by these problems. 94 Following this model, the current project explores 92 McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’.” 93 Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>”. 94 Ibid. 40 the tensions, juxtapositions, and contradictions informing the use of “family values” in contemporary debates over same-sex marriage and media decency. After completing the textual analysis portion of the project, I interviewed activists who were involved in the same-sex marriage debate in Montana, including Jeff Laszloffy, author of the constitutional initiative banning same-sex marriage in Montana and head of the Montana Family Foundation (state council of Focus on the Family). I also interviewed Karl Olson, past director of Montana LGBT advocacy group Pride! Inc, and state senator Christine Kaufmann, head of the Montana Human Rights Network, as well as the first (and only) openly gay legislator in the Montana state legislature. For the decency case study, I interviewed the Parents Television Council’s national director of research, Melissa Henson, and spoke with activists from the Orange County, Los Angeles, and L.A. Foothills local chapters of the PTC. The inclusion of interviews represents a significant departure from previous research on the rhetorical aspects of “family values,” which have been primarily textual in nature. Activists are particularly valuable to those studying shifts in cultural politics because they are the ones who, as sociologist Kristin Luker has demonstrated, shape and define the movement. 95 Speaking with those who produce the rhetoric of “family values” (on both sides) also generates a more nuanced account of how these discourses are produced, appropriated, or contested, and how discourse is generated in response to activists’ view of the current cultural climate. 95 Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 41 Textual analysis provides us with one way to track the rhetorical construction of “family values” in these debates, but speaking with activists is necessary to discern the reasons why such discourses have changed, and to determine what these changes were made in response to. Preview of Chapters The following chapters will explore three of the most prominent facets of the contemporary rhetoric of “family values” – a nostalgic view of the past, a concern with the moral authority of parents over children, and anxieties about gender identity. Chapter two analyzes the use of nostalgia as a rhetorical tactic in the same- sex marriage and media decency debates. Using textual analysis and interviews with activists, it discusses how the past is rhetorically constructed as an idealized space and time by conservative activists in both debates. It then looks more specifically at how narratives of decline in the same-sex marriage debate and media decency debate function as calls for current policies and future actions. On the other side of the debate, the chapter examines how opponents of conservative family values activists, including LGBT activists, critical scholars, and first amendment advocates, contest the mystification of nostalgia and the narrative of decline in conservative versions of “family values.” Finally, it considers the negative impact that nostalgia and sentimentality have on deliberation over matters of public policy. Chapter three analyzes the focus on moral authority in the rhetoric of “family values.” It begins by discussing the popular view of media as usurpers of parental 42 authority and corruptors of children, an understanding that dates all the way back to Plato’s Republic. It examines the influence of child protectionism on the regulation of media content through an analysis of court decisions, such as FCC v. Pacifica (1978), and media policy, such as the Children’s Television Act (1990). Using textual analyses of resources produced by the Parents Television Council and interviews with PTC activists, it then traces how this concern with moral authority manifests itself as both an anxiety and a rhetorical tactic in the discourse of decency crusaders. The second half of the chapter considers how moral authority is deployed and contested in the same-sex marriage debate, where activists on both sides are attempting to definitely answer the question of what is best for children. Chapter four analyzes the implicit focus on gender in the debates. It begins by considering how gender functions as a rhetorical strategy in debates that would seem to be, on the surface at least, primarily about issues of sexuality. Using textual analysis and interview data, it looks at how gender essentialism has refocused the conservative rhetoric of “family values,” and speculates on why LGBT activists have struggled to combat this change in rhetorical tactics. It then considers how discourses of praise and blame can be read as a means of gender normalization in the debate over media decency. Chapter five concludes the project with a discussion of the material impact of the rhetoric of family values, a review of the most significant findings, and brief remarks on the value of studying the discursive construction of the family through a rhetorical lens. 43 Chapter 2: Focus on Nostalgia History plays a key role in the debates over same-sex marriage and media decency, as the activists in both debates marshal the past to make an argument about the future. Both debates are characterized by a constant tension between tradition and progress, with conservative activists tethering their cause to a general longing for the familiar past, and first amendment or LGBT activists capitalizing on the desire for a freer, more egalitarian future. Nostalgia is a common rhetorical tactic when it comes to arguments about marriage and decency, one that has been both deployed and contested in these debates. Conservative family values advocates seek to direct our attention to the past, particularly the 1950s, when, as they see it, the social fabric of the United States had yet to be strained and stretched by the various forms of “family experimentation,” and when media and culture were still wholesome. Proponents of non-traditional family structures combat the rhetoric of nostalgia by highlighting the realities of the past that nostalgic discourses seek to obscure, and directing our attention back to the present and toward the future, telling us that progress is positive, and that better days lie ahead. Across numerous sites of cultural contestation, nostalgia is one of the most prominent facets of the ideograph of “family values.” This chapter explores how activists in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates utilize and challenge nostalgia in the pursuit of their various causes. It documents how conservative activists use nostalgia to focus public attention on an idyllic past, and how their 44 opponents reverse this rhetorical tactic to refocus public attention on an idyllic future. It begins with a discussion of the history and rhetorical function of nostalgia in public debates over social policy, which helps us better understand contemporary uses and contestations of nostalgia. The chapter will then demonstrate how nostalgia connects the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, discuss how public anxieties over both traditional and new media are informed by a longing for the past, and analyze the use of nostalgia in today’s decency debate. Constructing the Past through Nostalgia Before it became a rhetorical tactic, “nostalgia” was a medical term. Derived from the Greek nostos, which means homecoming or returning home, and algos, which means pain or suffering, nostalgia signified the psychological trauma and melancholy associated with extreme homesickness. Nostalgia remained a specific psychiatric diagnosis up until the 20 th century, when it came to signify a more general longing for the past. 1 The etymology of the term is important for theorizing nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy, one that uses temporal and spatial shifts to produce particular emotional reactions. The rhetoric of nostalgia directs our attention away from the concrete circumstances of our present time and toward an amorphous and 1 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979); Susan J. Matt, “You Can't Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History,” The Journal of American History 94.2 (2007): 469-97. 45 idealized past, while simultaneously constructing that past through strategic language choices. Using the term “traditional family” to describe the nuclear family arrangement is one example of how the rhetoric of nostalgia works to valorize the past. Conservative family values advocates offer similarly idyllic descriptions of previous eras of family life, highlighting positive cultural memories in order to obscure the bad ones. These nostalgic discourses function as what rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke has described as “terministic screens” – they reflect history, yes, but they also select and deflect various pieces of history in order to discursively construct an idealized past. 2 The nostalgic reverence surrounding the American nuclear family, for instance, focuses on the familial and social stability associated with this structure, while neglecting the isolation and domestic violence that have also characterized the nuclear family in years past. 3 This nostalgia also obscures the historical conditions that led to the emergence of the nuclear family, and the structural barriers that prevented many from enacting this ideal. 4 These factors must be erased in order to construct the nuclear family as universally and uniformly good. 2 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 45. 3 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Solly Dreman, The Family on the Threshold of the 21 st Century: Trends and Implications (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997); Ellen G. Friedman and Corinne Squire, Morality USA (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 4 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 46 The relationship between nostalgia and history is also more complex than it first appears. When it comes to the rhetoric of family values, nostalgia is often seen as a melancholy feeling produced by the accumulation of personal or collective histories, but it is more productive to understand this history in the Foucaultian sense, as the effect rather than the cause of nostalgic discourses. “All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia,” Foucault stated in an interview in 1982. “It’s a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present.” “But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present,” he warned. “it has to be excluded.” 5 Looking specifically at the nostalgia of “family values,” we can see how it functions not only as a reason for aggression and failed understanding, but also as a rhetorical means for advancing this sense of hostility and misunderstanding. It helps conservative advocates present the diversity of modern American family structures as proof of the decline of the traditional family, rather than a necessary response to structural constraints or the positive result of personal choice. When the traditional family is shrouded in the warm glow of nostalgia, and the past is discursively constructed as an ideal space and time, the present will always be less-than-ideal in comparison. 5 “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault - October 25 th , 1982,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock, 1988), 9-15. 47 Broad, unfavorable judgments of the present are made easier by the fact that nostalgic discourses tend to be quite general when it comes to their referent. “Formerly confined in time and place, nostalgia today engulfs the whole past,” argues historian David Lowenthal. 6 In other words, rather than explicitly comparing the present to a particular era of the past, advocates of conservative family values can gesture toward a strategically generalized past, allowing their audience to fill in this blank canvas with positive memories from their own specific pasts. Strategic word choices in the rhetoric of family values, which can be as simple as using positive words to recall the past and negative words to characterize the present, cue us to retrieve positive memories from our childhood, or, if these are lacking, positive images from mediated encounters with childhoods of the past, such as classic films like It’s A Wonderful Life or reruns of 1950s family sitcoms. This enthymematic aspect of the rhetoric of family values, which prompts the audience to supply the evidence supporting the nostalgic claim, also infuses the discourse with an emotional power that is difficult to resist. As a multi-faceted ideograph, “family values” means different things in different contexts, and different things to different people. According to critical sociologist Judith Stacey, the amorphous nature of family values allows the rhetoric to operate on emotional, rather than rational, frequencies: The vague, but resonant language of family values functions more like potent images than like verbal communications subject to rational debate […] Addressing emotional, rather than rational, frequencies, family values 6 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6 48 discourse offers politicians and populace a brilliant defense mechanism with which to displace anxieties over race, gender, sexual, and class antagonisms that were unleashed as the modern family regime collapsed. 7 The first chapter discussed how “family values” has been invoked in response to these anxieties, and how a normative discourse of the traditional family has been used to police racial minorities, to gender particular behaviors, and to reinforce class distinctions. As an ideograph, “family values” serves as warrant for actions taken in the name of the public, specifically the enactment of public policy that benefits some while punishing others. As such, “family values” should be subject to rational public or political debate. But the same thing that makes the rhetoric of family values powerful is what often makes it immune to critique – it evokes powerful emotions or memories that seem beyond contestation. The moral goodness of “family values” has become naturalized, just like the traditional family. As a rhetorical tactic, nostalgia purports to return us to a simpler time in American life, a time before families were fragmented, before we were faced with adultery, divorce, absentee fathers, and all of the other “problems” affecting us today. If the social order seemed stronger back then, it was certainly because the American family was stronger, or so the logic goes. But it remains unclear exactly why this narrative, which is out of step with many known facts about both the recent and not-so-recent pasts, succeeds in convincing otherwise rational people. Numerous social histories of the family in American society have revealed that the “golden age” 7 Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 101-102. 49 of the traditional family never was. 8 The family has been “always already dysfunctional,” pristine in theory but never working in practice. 9 And we are generally quick to condone things we find overly nostalgic or sentimentalized. We can recognize when nostalgia is being deployed in art or media to play on our emotions, so what is different about the nostalgia of family values rhetoric? According to cultural studies scholar Roddy Reid, contradictions between this nostalgia and social or personal histories actually serve to increase the efficacy of such narratives: [T]he mobilization of desires for “family” has been no less powerful because of its discursive basis…narratives of lack of “family” helped render new norms impervious to either the vagaries of individual and collective experience or to “empirical” refutation. Catastrophic private or social events tended not so much to discredit “family” as to renew calls for its protection and revival. 10 Just as “family values” is most often defined negatively, according to who does not have family values or what is contrary to family values, the ideal family is also constructed through narratives of what is “lacking” in alterative family structures. Reid focused on how these discourses of lack function to construct families and individuals as privileged or aberrant subjects. When “family” is discursively constructed through disabling practices of nostalgia, the term operates as a technology of discipline that normalizes one particular family structure, and 8 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were; John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9 Roddy Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 10 Reid, Families in Jeopardy, 8. 50 consequently stigmatizes all others, constructing those individuals outside of the nuclear family as aberrant subjects. And if these subjects understand themselves and their kinship structure in relation to the dominant narrative of lack, then they have to understand themselves as lacking. Looking at the problem from this angle, we see again why the mobilization of desire for the “traditional family” maintains its power in the face of a nontraditional reality. If you accept the discourse of lack surrounding the family, then you are more likely to attribute familial conflict to ways in which your family is “lacking,” thereby internalizing this technology of discipline. The disciplinary power of nostalgia is particularly difficult to combat due to the low burden of proof placed on those who mobilize such rhetoric. Because the ideal is located in the past, its current absence only supports the contention that the present is less than ideal. Those who wish to contest the nostalgia of family values rhetoric must therefore work to expose the negative aspects of the past that have been strategically swept under the rug, and must challenge the conservative story of perpetual decline, crafting an alternative narrative of social progress. Activists on both sides of the same-sex marriage and media decency debates have rotated the ideograph of “family values” to highlight the facet of nostalgia, conservative activists hoping to capitalize on a general longing for the stability and simplicity of the past and their opponents hoping to reveal this nostalgia as a pernicious and misleading rhetorical strategy. In the same-sex marriage debate, conservative advocates of family values are quick to identify the decline of the traditional family as the root cause of a variety of 51 contemporary social ills, ranging from teenage pregnancy to violent crime. 11 These activists lament the passing of a simpler time in American life, when families stayed together and parents were more invested and involved in their children’s lives. And while they tend to be vague when it comes to pinpointing exactly when this decline started, the rhetoric of family values generally evokes images of the 1950s nuclear family as it was portrayed in that era. Wistful recollections of breadwinner fathers and stay-at-home moms draw rhetorical power from their representations in classic 1950s family sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952), Father Knows Best (1954), Leave It To Beaver (1957), and The Donna Reed Show (1958), and may hold particular sway over those who grew up with these images on broadcast television and, later, in syndication. Conservative activists then juxtapose these images of family and social harmony against the fractured and fragmented modern family, arguing that each step away from the traditional family is a step closer to moral and societal ruin. These activists see a bleak future for both marriage and children, and warn that this dystopia can only be prevented through the passage of laws and social policies that protect traditional marriage and reinforce the values of the traditional family. Conservative activists in the media decency debate also look back fondly on early family sitcoms, for somewhat different reasons. While decency activists would certainly applaud these programs for their positive portrayal of family life, such 11 Focus on the Family, “Social Issues: Understanding the Issues that Affect Your Family,” http://www.family.org/socialissues/ (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5Xj8bUDat). 52 sitcoms are more likely to be cited as examples of just how decent television used to be. Like their conservative counterparts in the same-sex marriage debate, these activists construct a narrative of decline, one that moves from the wholesome sitcoms and variety shows that filled the airwaves in the early days of television to the raunchy reality shows that populate network television today. In 1950s domestic sitcoms, married couples slept in separate beds, a dramatic conceit that would be unthinkable today. In addition to the increasing acceptance of sex on the screen, media decency activists lament what they view as an increasing crudeness in contemporary media culture. With each passing year, the entertainment industry can say and do more things on television than they could before. And, with each technological innovation, children are gaining increasing access to the world of adult secrets. Many children now have a television and computer in their bedrooms, giving parents much less control and knowledge of their child’s viewing habits than they had in the past. Just as conservative advocates of traditional marriage long for the past dominance of the nuclear family, decency crusaders long for the days when parents and children gathered, as a family, around a single radio or television set. Proponents of same-sex marriage, and general critics of conservative family values, take issue with their opponents’ sometimes earnest and sometimes calculated use of nostalgia. They are faced with two difficult rhetorical tasks – crafting more realistic stories about the past and constructing more optimistic stories about the evolution of the American family. These activists counter the mythology of the 1950s nuclear family, highlighting how this “timeless” structure came about in 53 response to a specific historical context and how this “natural” family setup was constructed through ideologies of gender, race, and class. They also make arguments in favor of increasingly diverse family structures and arrangements, working to transform the very human longing for simpler, happier times into support for expanding economic support and extending legal rights to families outside of the nuclear family model. In the case of the same-sex marriage debate, LGBT activists often mention that amending the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage would be the first time in history that this document has been altered to disenfranchise rather than enfranchise a particular population, shrinking rather than expanding freedom in the United States. 12 These statements serve as a temporal and rhetorical counter against the conservative ideal of returning to the era of the traditional family. According to LGBT activists, we need to move forward, not back, to ensure the continued progress of American society. The lines in the media decency debate are not as clearly drawn. Opposition to decency crusaders is loosely organized and, when it comes to the issue of children and media, opponents are reluctant to explicitly argue the counter-position: that children should not be protected from exposure to adult themes and content. In contemporary American culture, the child has been constructed as a vulnerable 12 See Human Rights Campaign, “Background and Key Points on Marriage,” http://nmmstream.net/ hrc/downloads/meetup_docs/marriage_keypts.pdf (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TvPxiMYM), or Joann Elder and Joe Elder, “Americans Speak Out Against the FMA,” Human Rights Campaign, http://www.hrc.org/voteno/speakout.htm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TvPoK4Az). 54 innocent. It is thus difficult to argue, as a few civil liberties activists have, 13 that children should be given the opportunity to grapple with serious adults issues through the media. Free speech arguments are far more common, as they enable activists to counter decency crusaders’ stories of cultural decline with narratives of progress. While decency activists are appalled at how much can be done and said on television today, free speech activists celebrate the expanding range of what can be expressed without fear of censors or censure. Like their counterparts in the same-sex marriage debate, they are working to foreground the issues concealed by nostalgia, specifically the white, patriarchal, and heterosexual world portrayed in the television programs lauded by decency crusaders for their wholesome values. The remainder of this chapter tracks the deployment and contestation of nostalgia in these debates. It begins by exploring how the nostalgia of family values rhetoric is used to discursively construct an idealized past, and documents how scholars and activists are working to uncover the pieces of history that have been obscured by this rhetoric. It then considers how constructions of the past are used to pass judgment on the present, and how comparisons between past and present “realities” are used to support calls for future action. The chapter ends by discussing how rhetorics of nostalgia and counter-nostalgia operate on emotional frequencies in the same-sex marriage and media decency debate, and considers the implications of the predominance of pathos on future public deliberations and debate on these issues. 13 Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 55 Constructing the Decline of the Traditional Family Conservative activists in cultural debates often invoke the past to make a point about the present and predictions about the future. The glow of an idyllic past, which may be explicit or implicit in conservative discourse, tends to cast a shadow on the present, and make the future look dim. This past is discursively constructed through nostalgia, which reflects, selects, and deflects collective memories and personal experiences. When it comes to the rhetoric of family values, stories of the past are characterized by what rhetorical critic Dana Cloud calls “moments of utopian yearning for a nurturing community of a mythical bygone era.” 14 Echoing Fredric Jameson’s essay on utopian moments in popular culture, 15 Cloud argues that nostalgia for the traditional family reflects widespread social anxieties regarding race, class, and gender, and enables conservatives to offer the “reconstituted family” as a “haven from the turmoil” that has been created by class antagonisms and identity politics. 16 According to this logic, hope for the future can be restored through a return to the family values and rituals of the past. These nostalgic visions of the traditional family are often communicated in the form of autobiography, which enables conservative advocates of family values to construct a particular story of the past through the practice of reminiscence. Dana Cloud cites Barbara Bush’s address at the 1992 Republic President Convention as an 14 Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 398. 15 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979-80): 130-148. 16 Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>.” 56 illustration of using utopian autobiography as a narrative strategy. During the speech, Barbara Bush used her own family history to illustrate what conservatives meant when they used the term “family values,” and to construct the past in a way that would highlight social anxieties regarding today’s children and families: In many ways, these were the best years of our lives. George’s days in the fields were dusty with long hours and hard work, but no matter when he got home, he always had time to throw a ball or listen to the kids. I car pooled, was a den mother, and went to more Little League games than I can count. We went to church, we cheered at Fourth of July picnics and fireworks, and we sang carols together at Christmas. 17 Mrs. Bush prefaced these remarks by pointing out that parenting today was much more complicated than it used to be: “You know, we know that parents have to cope with so much more in today’s world, more drugs, more violence, more promiscuity,” a statement that allowed her to juxtapose the past with the present, and to reiterate the conservative claim that a return to the traditional family offered the best hopes for protecting children from drugs, violence, and sex. Over a decade later, conservative activists still use utopian narratives of the past to call for a return to the traditional family, and the traditional values associated with it. In response to the question, “Was a good family life easier to achieve in earlier days?,” Focus on the Family founder James Dobson uses his own upbringing to argue for a return to the standards of the past: 17 Barbara Bush, Remarks to Republic National Convention, August 19, 1992, as cited in Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 387-419. 57 I attended high school during the "Happy Days" of the 1950s, and I never saw or even heard of anyone taking an illegal drug. It happened, I suppose, but it was certainly no threat to me. Some students liked to get drunk, but alcohol was not a big deal in my social environment. Others played around with sex, but the girls who did were considered “loose” and were not respected. Virginity was still in style for males and females. Occasionally a girl came up pregnant, but she was packed off in a hurry, and I never knew where she went. As for homosexuals and lesbians, I heard there were a few around, but I didn't know them personally. There were certainly no posters on our bulletin boards advertising Gay Pride Month or Condom Week. Most of my friends respected their parents, went to church on Sundays, studied hard enough to get by, and lived fairly clean lives. There were exceptions, of course, but this was the norm. 18 Utopian impulses are evident in Dobson’s description of the “happy days” of his adolescence. Here the past is discursively constructed as a morally pure space and time, where most children respected their elders, attended church regularly, devoted themselves to their studies, and lived “clean” lives. Throughout this recollection, the social conservatism of this past is juxtaposed against the liberalism of the present, which he invokes by remarking on the absence of contemporary cultural events like Gay Pride Month or comprehensive sex education campaigns. Dobson’s reply brings up an important point about the theoretical framework employed here, one that should be made explicit before we consider additional examples. When we understand the past as a discursive construction, and history as the effect rather than the cause of discourse, it is tempting to see strategy and perhaps artifice behind every recollection. While Dobson is certainly advancing an agenda in the passage above, he is probably not crafting a fictive version of his upbringing. 18 Focus on the Family, “Was a good family life easier to achieve in earlier days?” http://family.cust help.com/cgibin/family.cfg (accessed December 10, 2007 archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5T9p3CZea). 58 These statements reflect the experiences that he, and many others, had growing up in mid-century America. But operating under the assumption of veracity does not preempt us from viewing nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy. Even earnest nostalgia constructs a particular version of the past through reflection, selection, and deflection. If we agree that these words reflect Dobson’s actual lived experience, we can still analyze how the things he selected to convey that experience, and the things he has deflected in telling his own story – drug and alcohol problems, teenage pregnancy, the social ostracizing of gays and lesbians – work to present an idealized version of the past and preempt alternative, less-than-ideal versions. Consider how different the above narrative would be if it were told from the perspective of the girls who were considered “loose,” or the young mothers who were “packed off in a hurry,” or the gays and lesbians who had to hide their sexuality from peers. These alternative perspectives are not included because they do not fit into the narrative of cultural decline that Dobson and other social or religious conservatives seek to establish. If culture is getting worse and the traditional family is getting weaker, then life must have been better – and the family must have been stronger – in the past. Conservative advocates construct this image of the past through explicitly idyllic imagery. A 2003 Family Research Council lecture on the mid-century American family lauded the “warm domesticity” of the 1950s, and discussed how this era “embodied a true culture of marriage, where all the signals pointed toward family-building,” the home “rested on greater intimacy, companionship, and inward focus,” and the family unit was “a more emotion-driven, 59 child-centered entity.” 19 The focus on suburban family life, which is explicit in this text but implicit in many others, helps conservative activists construct the traditional family as a refuge from the pressures of the modern world, and the domestic sphere as a defense against the dangers of the public sphere. 20 In this construction of the past, the fact that the nuclear family enjoyed its greatest dominance during a time of unparalleled prosperity and relative social tranquility is no accident. According to conservative family values advocates, the relationship between family stability and social stability is causal, and operates in one particular direction – the traditional family instills children with the values necessary for social stability. The conservative construction of the past is rounded out by nostalgic longings for a time when society was supportive of both traditional families and traditional values. In the same way that idyllic narratives of past family life are juxtaposed against present social problems to support a narrative of decline, the social conservatism of the 1950s is juxtaposed against the social turmoil of current cultural debates to make a point about what conservatives view as the death of traditional values in many parts of today’s culture. In a 2005 Focus on the Family Magazine article entitled, “Our Father Knows Best,” Tom Minnery responds to liberal critics who have accused Focus on the Family trying to take the country back to the 1950s. “Is that so bad?” he asks. “It was a time when two-parent families were 19 Allan C. Carlson, “‘Bailey Park' or 'Greater Pottersville'?: The Natural Family in the 21st Century Suburb,” Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=PL03C1 (accessed: December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5T9yGnUfc). 20 Carlson, “‘Bailey Park’ or ‘Greater Pottersville’?” 60 the norm and children could pray in public school classrooms. It was a time when children were safe to play in the neighborhood and laws protected pre-born children.” Additionally, “our society acknowledged God, valued families and protected innocent human life.” 21 Here we see again how rhetorics of nostalgia construct idyllic visions of the past and allow activists to implicitly highlight problems with the present. Here, the converse of a society that acknowledges God, values families, and protects innocent human lives is one that is becoming increasingly secular, anti-family, and pro-choice. It is this view of the past and present that prompts conservative activists to declare that their traditional values – and the traditional family – are coming under increasing attack. Constructing the Decline of Popular Culture The nostalgic facet of the ideograph of “family values” also plays a large role in the media decency debate. Here, instead of focusing on the endangered status of the traditional family, conservative activists direct their attention to what they perceive as the rapid decline of family friendly programming in the media. The Parents Television Council was founded in response to what many conservatives perceived as declining decency standards in the medium most accessible to children – broadcast television. When asked to describe the impetus behind the organization’s 21 Tom Minnery, “Our Father Knows Best: Those who advocate for traditional values are accused of trying to take us back to the 1950s. Is that so bad?” Focus on the Family, http://www.focusonthe family.com/focusmagazine/publicpolicy/A000000189.cfm (accessed: December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TA8PzBZh). 61 founding, PTC Research Director Melissa Henson was explicit about this decline: “[The PTC] was largely created in response to a growing recognition that primetime broadcast television was getting coarser, with more frequent sexual content, more explicit sexual situations, coarse or foul language, more explicit graphic violent content.” 22 Even more significant, according to Henson, was the fact that this content was appearing in earlier timeslots, making it more likely to be viewed by children. Increasing levels of foul language, violence, and sexual content, coupled with a dearth of family friendly programming in primetime has the PTC and other decency activists worried about contemporary popular culture. “From the perspective of a parent concerned with what kind of images and message their child might be exposed to on TV, I think the state of TV today is pretty deplorable,” said Henson in a December 2003 interview with the Pittsburgh Gazette. “There’s very little on broadcast networks or even on expanded basic cable that’s really suitable for a family audience.” 23 As a media watchdog organization, the Parents Television Council is primarily concerned with documenting indecency in current television programming. But, just as the stress of modern family life seems worse when juxtaposed against the assumed stability of the traditional family, the current state of television appears particularly debaucherous when it is compared to classic television shows like I Love 22 Melissa Henson (director of research, Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, October 2007. 23 Rob Owen and Barbara Vancheri, “You Can Say That on TV,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 11, 2003, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/news/2003/violencestudy_postgazette.htm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TAGoXApy). 62 Lucy and Leave It To Beaver. When the television industry was in its infancy, manufacturers marketed the device to parents as a way to bring the family together, and producers filled the set with “family friendly” programming that both parents and children could watch. 24 The Parents Television Council highlights the disjuncture between past and present television on its website, in the very first sentence on the Broadcast Indecency Campaign page: The default setting for broadcast television used to be family-oriented, while those desiring edgier, more explicit fare were free to seek it out. Today’s prime time television programming has become almost uniformly unsuitable for families, and often directly hostile to their values, making it very difficult for parents to shield their children and seek out alternative entertainment. 25 The rhetorical juxtaposition of the past with the present works here just like it does in the same-sex marriage debate. Nostalgic recollections of “better times” are used to construct an idyllic past, a bygone era in which popular culture works for rather than against families. The ideal(s) of the past are then used to castigate current producers for polluting the culture, and present a return to the standards of the past as our best hope for a better, more decent, future. Before we proceed further, it should be noted that the narratives of decline presented by media decency activists are less controversial than those presented by opponents of same-sex marriage. Although trends in family history have been 24 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 25 Parents Television Council, “Broadcast Indecency Campaign: Help Us Put an End to Broadcast Indecency,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/fcc/main.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TAG8b4JZ). 63 debated by both activists and scholars, 26 it is difficult to argue with the claim that broadcast television has become far less conservative, or that the programming of the past contained much less profanity, sex, and violence. This was, of course, the product of much stricter regulation by advertisers, network censors, and the Federal Communications Commission. In the early days of television, sexual innuendo was discouraged and profanity was completely prohibited. 27 So the Parents Television Council and other media decency groups are correct in their assertion that much of broadcast television and most all of our current cable television programming would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. But the relative lack of controversy surrounding such statements does not mean that decency activists do not rely on a similar rhetoric of nostalgia to achieve their objectives. It is fairly easy for an organization like the Parents Television Council to convince the public that decency is on the decline in popular culture, but far more difficult for them to make the case for increased FCC regulation or tougher enforcement of current decency standards. In an era of media deregulation, where freedom of expression has been equated with free market ideology, calling for the regulation of content is tantamount to censorship. Evoking nostalgic yearnings for shows known for their wholesomeness and decency, however, allows decency crusaders to make a subtler and more emotionally powerful argument. If, by 26 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997), Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (NY: Basic Books, 1992). 27 Owen and Vancheri, “You Can Say That on TV.” 64 contrasting a contemporary show like Desperate Housewives with a classic program like The Donna Reed Show, they can produce a desire for ‘the way television used to be,’ then they can make a much more compelling case for going back to the way the television industry used to be – family-oriented and highly regulated. This strategic contrast, between contemporary programming known for its sexual and/or violent content and past programming remembered for its wholesome family values, appears throughout the discourse of the Parents Television Council and its supporters. Leave it to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963, is frequently mentioned and often used synecdochically to stand in for the golden era of the family sitcom. “We have gone from ‘Leave It to Beaver’ to ‘Beavis and Butthead,’” said Scott Plakon, director of the Orlando chapter of the PTC, in the Daytona Beach News Journal. 28 In a letter published on the Parents Television Council’s website, a PTC supporter lamented the absence of traditional values in today’s television programs: “And isn’t it truly sad that we can’t find a modern day version of Leave It To Beaver to show our kids how to interact with Eddie and Lumpy and Ms. Sherman, and Dad and Mom.” 29 In a 2004 column, PTC founder L. Brent Bozell chastised advertisers for supporting Desperate Housewives, which he described as the latest offender in a long series of shows that aim to “pulverize” the 1950s values 28 Parents Television Council, “No Use Fretting Over Rampant Pottymouths,” http://www.parentstv. org/PTC/grassroots/Chapters/FL/central.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5TA2ccgpp). 29 Parents Television Council, “Letters to the Editor,” http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/letters/main.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TrbWWwro). 65 of Leave It To Beaver, creating a “catty, snarky, amoral cesspool” in their wake. 30 Even positive reviews of contemporary programming rely on (and reinforce) this idealized image of the past. The PTC’s online programming guide, designed to serve as informational resource for parents, recommends The Bernie Mac Show, which it describes as “Leave It To Beaver updated to more modern tastes.” 31 Bernie Mac is recommended to parents for a number of reasons, but primarily because it resembles an idealized program from the past. According to the programming guide, although they are temporally separated by 50 years, both revolve around the same plot on the importance of family: “A common, real-life problem comes up, there is some dismay and confusion, but eventually, through good parenting and bonding, all is solved.” 32 Although the nostalgia of PTC activists generally evokes the 1950s, their idealization of past television programming is not limited to this era. Crystal Madison, a state-level chapter director in New Jersey, devoted a November 2007 entry in her official PTC blog to comparing the television shows she remembers from her childhood to the shows her children encounter today. Describing herself as a “nostalgia junkie,” Madison looks back fondly on The Dukes of Hazzard, which ran on network television from 1979 to 1985. “As a Chapter Director for the New 30 L. Brent Bozell, “Boycotts and Catty Girls,” Parents Television Council, October 22, 2004, http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/lbbcolumns/2004/1022.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TragPb9E). 31 Jesse Menn, “FOX has a new hit with family friendly sitcom, the Bernie Mac Show,” Parents Television Council, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reviews/berniemac.asp (accessed: December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TukToyPH). 32 Menn, “FOX has a new hit with family friendly sitcom, the Bernie Mac Show.” 66 Jersey Parents Television Council, I am also scared,” she writes. “TV today is not what it was when I was little.” 33 Madison acknowledges that her parents probably experienced similar feelings when confronted with The Dukes of Hazzard: “I’m sure Daisy’s ‘dukes’ sent their eyebrows skyrocketing from time to time.” 34 But, according to Madison, short shorts are nothing in comparison to the things children can now see on television. “I would rather have my toddler see Daisy Duke sliding across the hood of the General Lee over any 20-second clip of MTV or other basic cable shows. Don’t even get me started on general programming.” 35 Although this text reveals the relativity of nostalgia in its acknowledgment that parents will always long for the wholesome innocence of past television eras, Madison’s mention of her parents reaction to The Dukes of Hazzard helps her to contribute to the narrative of decline that characterizes much of the discourse of decency crusaders. By presenting the television programming of her childhood as superior to contemporary fare, and implying that her parents had been exposed to even less indecency, she verifies the general sense of decline in popular culture with personal testimony. Similar narratives of decline are present in the Parents Television Council’s critiques of contemporary television’s portrayal of the American family, which make it clear that “family friendly” programming is more than just the absence of sex, 33 Crystal Madison, “Establishing Media Guidelines in Your Home,” NJ Parents Television Council, http://njparentstelevisioncouncil.blogspot.com/2007/11/establishing-media-guidelines-in-your.html (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Tuko5Jow). 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 67 violence, and profanity. It is also about adhering to the standards of traditional family values, by portraying parents and parenting in a positive light. This focus on the importance of parents is another point at which the media decency debate intersects with the same-sex marriage debate. Conservative activists in both debates believe in the moral authority of parents. They believe that parents have every right to control the information and knowledge that their children receive, and they believe that parents have a tremendous influence on the social, emotional, and psychological development of their children. These assumptions inform the conservative belief that good parenting within the private sphere of the home will help to prevent or remedy various social problems in the community outside the home, 36 and that the negative influences of “bad parenting” has far-reaching social consequences. In order to maintain moral authority in the home, children must view parents as persons worthy of respect. This is the reason that negative media portrayals of parents are almost as problematic as indecency to the Parents Television council. Thus, amongst the many discussions of declining decency standards in popular culture, we find equal concern with the declining status of mothers and fathers in television programming. In a May 2006 “Culture Watch” column written in honor of Mother’s Day, the PTC’s Christopher Gildemeister writes that “motherhood has joined the many other institutions which were once universally praised and respected but now are 36 For a more recent example of this perspective on parenting in the African-American community, see Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint, Come On People: From Victims to Victors (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007). 68 denigrated and mocked by the ‘entertainment’ media,” adding that “[t]elevision is particularly notorious in this regard.” 37 He devotes the rest of the column to a brief historical sketch of the decline of motherhood on the small screen, starting with the program Mama, which ran from 1949 to 1957, and portrayed mothers as loving, intelligent, and worthy of the respect they received. After discussing how “this model of a strong yet compassionate mother” was also exemplified by family sitcoms such as the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show, Gildemeister argues that anyone worried about the contemporary family has good reason to feel nostalgic about these programs: “In today’s more ‘sophisticated’ age such portrayals are sneered at; but nevertheless they did inculcate in young viewers respect for their mothers, respect which was and is deserved.” According to Gildemeister: This pattern of respect for mothers continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s in programs such as The Brady Bunch, Happy Days and Eight is Enough. The respectful depiction of mothers as an integral component of a strong family was particularly emphasized in programs such as The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie, which took place in eras when family unity and maternal competence was crucial to a family's survival. Thereafter (reflecting real-life trends) motherhood was shown taking a variety of forms […] But in all cases it was shown that the mothers could cope, did do well for their families and children, and were deserving of (and were treated with) respect. While today there are still lingering traces on television of this positive portrayal of motherhood, such as Reba or Everybody Hates Chris, such a depiction has largely been replaced by one far more negative. 38 37 Christopher Gildemeister, “Culture Watch,” Parents Television Council, May 15, 2006, http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/publications/culturewatch/2006/0515.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TA1YOCav). 38 Gildemeister, “Culture Watch.” 69 In Gildemeister’s history, the rapid decline of motherhood on television occurred in 1987, when Married with Children premiered on the FOX network, and respect was replaced with vilification or contempt. Mothers increasingly became objects of ridicule, women who deserved to be disobeyed or insulted by their husbands and children. Gildemeister documents a similar trend in the depiction of fathers and fatherhood in a June 2006 column written to commemorate Father’s Day: Once, such fathers were celebrated by American popular culture. From wise figures such as Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy film series and radio programs such as Henry Aldrich to television programs such as Leave It to Beaver, The Dick Van Dyke Show and the quintessentially-titled Father Knows Best, the father was portrayed with respect as the head of his household, wise and compassionate, an uncomplaining “good provider” and a firm but loving disciplinarian and moral guide to his children […] Sadly, this is no longer the case […] Today, television’s fathers almost universally conform to the new stereotype of fathers as loutish, ignorant, and incompetent […] And cable television is going even further in portraying fathers as idiots and in encouraging children to ignore them and treat them with disdain. 39 Texts such as these contribute to the narrative of decline that the Parents Television Council seeks to establish, one that depends heavily on nostalgic yearnings for the way television used to be. Here, we see how the discourse of decency crusaders intersects with the broader nostalgia of family values, which longs to return to a simpler time in American family life, when almost any problem could be solved through good parenting practices. 39 Christopher Gildemeister, “Culture Watch,” Parents Television Council, June 19, 2006, http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/publications/culturewatch/2006/0619.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Tv29ki7u). 70 Demystifying the Nostalgia of Family Values Opposition to the nostalgia of conservative family values has taken two major forms: critiquing the historical evidence (or lack of historical evidence) used to support conservative narratives of decline, and reframing the evidence in order to construct a narrative of progress. Significantly, most of the texts that work to demystify the idealized past invoked by conservative family values advocates are found in academic rather than popular literatures. Social historians, sociologists, and critical scholars of discourse and public policy have all weighed in on what they view as a strategic misuse, misrepresentation, or disregard for historical trends in marriage and family life. By assembling social histories and conducting critical sociologies of contemporary American family life, these scholars use research to illustrate how nostalgia erases the negative elements of the past, giving us a distorted view of the relationship between family and society, one that attributes social ills and structural problems to the disintegration of the nuclear family. Social historian Stephanie Coontz and sociologist Judith Stacey have both dedicated a good portion of their research to dispelling the myths perpetuated by conservative family values advocates. Coontz’s first take on the rhetoric of nostalgia, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, went to press just as Vice President Dan Quayle was blaming the riots and violence in Los Angeles on the breakdown of family in the black community. 40 According to Coontz, she wrote the book specifically to combat this use of nostalgia, and to dispel what she 40 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 71 felt were widespread myths regarding historical trends in the American family structure. Through substantial historical data, she contests the tranquility and the universalism attributed to the 1950s nuclear family, documenting how the ideologies of gender, race, and class that supported the nuclear family arrangement led to psychological stress and domestic abuse within the confines of the private sphere, and how our nostalgic recollections of the 1950s stay-at-home mother and breadwinner father erase the non-white and non-middle-class households that could not afford to have only one parent working outside of the home. 41 Coontz also troubles the causal relationship that conservative family values advocates have drawn between the strength of the traditional family and the strength of the social order. For instance, rather than attributing the social and economic stability of the mid-century United States to the dominance of the nuclear family and the avoidance of divorce, as both social conservatives tend to do, she argues that this causal link should be reversed – that we should understand the dominance of the nuclear family not as the cause but as the result of economic security. 42 According to Coontz, the nuclear family would not have been possible without the numerous forms of economic assistance offered by the United States government during that time, particularly the G.I. bills that provided World War II veterans with free or low- cost college educations and money for the housing they would need to raise their 41 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 42 Ibid. 72 families. 43 She is careful to point out that she is not endorsing divorce, which is indisputably difficult on both parents and children, just seeking to illuminate the structural factors that the conservative focus on personal agency, or staying together for the sake of the children, has managed to erase. Judith Stacey’s research on the contemporary family focuses on how nostalgic longings for the 1950s nuclear family function rhetorically in the realm of politics. According to Stacey, “moralistic rhetoric deployed in the name of The Family has been fueling politics that harm rather than help actual families.” 44 We base public policy on an outdated ideal of the nuclear family structure, Stacey argues, instead of supporting the increasingly diverse collection of real families that are actually impacted by this policy. Reforming the American welfare system through the addition of “marriage incentives” is just one example of the impact of nostalgia on public policy. 45 According to Dana Cloud, nostalgia and family values rhetoric go hand in hand, enabling policy makers and pundits to call for idealistic solutions to concrete structural problems, such as poverty and institutional racism. 46 Cloud points that calling for a renewal of family values in lower class minority communities helps conservative activists to privatize social responsibility for such 43 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 44 Stacey, In the Name of the Family, 3. 45 The fact that welfare is reformed through the addition of “marriage incentives” illustrates this point. 46 Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>.” 73 problems, which may explain why family values has been a key rhetorical resource for both social and economic conservatives. While scholars like Coontz and Stacey have been cited or quoted by the media, 47 it is safe to say that academic writings on the nostalgia of family values rhetoric have not had a significant impact on the public debate over same-sex marriage. From the perspective of those who wish to contest the conservative vision of the American family, this is unfortunate, as the rhetoric of nostalgia depends heavily on the erasure of certain pieces of history. Historical knowledge may be one of the most effective means of diffusing the emotional power of nostalgia, yet this tactic is rarely if ever employed by advocates of same-sex marriage or families. Instead, LGBT rights activists work to construct narratives of progress that counter their conservative opponents’ narratives of decline. These counter-narratives challenge the very foundation of this nostalgia – namely, the assertion that things were better in the past – by focusing on the fact that, for the LGBT community, things were not better in the past. In the eyes of conservative activists, the passage of time has brought with it major shifts in social norms and practices, changes that threaten the privileged status of the traditional family, and form the plot-points of the narrative of the narrative of decline. LGBT rights activists, on the other hand, see both social and political progress for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people 47 See Marilyn Gardner, “Was It Easier Being a Mother in 1908?” Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 2008, http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0508/p17s02-hfgn.html (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XifHYOdi); Mackenzie Carpenter, “What Happens to Kids Raised by Gay Parents?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 10, 2007, http://www.postgazette.com/pg/07161/ 793042-51.stm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XifSmigF). 74 in these shifting norms and practices. So when conservative activists attempt to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage through state and federal level “marriage amendments,” the most common response from LGBT rights group has been to highlight this narrative of slow but steady progress. Many activists focused their discourse on the ideals of progress that formed the basis of the constitutional process. In a 2004 speech at the U.S. Capitol, Human Rights Campaign activist Joann Elder argued that the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which had just been endorsed by President Bush, was fundamentally “un- American” because “our Constitution has always guaranteed liberty and the equal rights of all Americans.” 48 “It has historically been amended to expand America’s promise – to former slaves, to women, to young people – but never to single out a group of Americans for unequal treatment,” she continued. “This amendment would turn our Constitution on its head by making discrimination part of our country’s charter.” 49 Here the LGBT narrative intersects with other stories of social progress, specifically the enfranchisement of groups that had been previously denied equal treatment by the United States government. This vision of the constitution, as a living document that exists to expand rather than narrow rights, became a recurring trope in the discourse of LGBT activists and their supporters. A 2004 Human Rights 48 Joann Elder and Joe Elder, “Americans Speak Out Against the FMA,” Human Rights Campaign, http://www.hrc.org/voteno/speakout.htm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5TvPoK4Az). 49 Ibid. 75 Campaign memo on talking points to be used in debates against the Federal Marriage Amendment placed a more detailed version of this narrative on the first page: The Constitution has historically served to expand liberty and equality – by abolishing slavery and giving women the right to vote, among other rights. This amendment would mark the first [time] that a specific group of Americans, namely same-sex couples and their children, would be singled out and denied rights and discriminated against in the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution ensures equal treatment for ALL Americans. This amendment would destroy that equality by amending the Constitution to treat one group of Americans differently from others. Since the Bill of Rights (amendments 1-10) was ratified in 1791, the Constitution has only been amended 17 times. Those amendments have overwhelmingly been used to expand rights. 50 While conservatives placed a federal marriage amendment, and subsequent state- level marriage amendments, in the context of the general decline of the traditional family (and “family values”) in American culture, LGBT activists worked to reframe the amendment as an obstacle to social progress. Additionally, by linking their cause to the enfranchisement of African-Americans and women’s suffrage, advocates of same-sex marriage were hoping to tie their cause to a broader civil rights discourse. 51 An anti-FMA poster created by the Human Rights Campaign communicates states that conservative activists are attempting “to make GLBT people second-class 50 Human Rights Campaign, “Background and Key Points on Marriage,” http://nmmstream.net/hrc/ downloads/meetup_docs/marriage_keypts.pdf (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5TvPxiMYM). 51 Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?: A Queer Dilemma,” in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 395-420; Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Kathleen E. Hull, “The Political Limits of the Rights Frame: The Case of Same-Sex Marriage in Hawaii,” Sociological Perspectives 44:2 (2001): 207-32. 76 citizens forever.” 52 Just as the rhetoric of nostalgia functions in conservative family values to direct public attention to the past, the rhetoric of civil rights discourse is used by LGBT activist to turn this attention back to the future, and to the possibility of full marriage rights. Challenging Narratives of Decline in the Decency Debate Resistance to the rhetoric of nostalgia is far less organized in the decency debate. As mentioned above, this may be partly due to the fact that most people agree with the assertion that contemporary popular culture contains more explicit sexual context, more graphic violence, and more frequent profanity than in the past. Or, as a 2002 article on decency standards in the Miami Herald put it, “TV, once expected to be a polite guest in our living rooms, has turned into more of drunken party-crasher. Sex, violence, and language that in earlier days would have triggered FCC threats and congressional investigations is now routine.” 53 It is difficult if not impossible to dispute empirically historical trends here in the way they have been in the same-sex marriage debate. So, when decency crusaders are challenged, their opponents generally take issue with the negative interpretation of these trends, or the resulting censorship of popular culture. 52 Human Rights Campaign, “This June / Fight the Federal Marriage Amendment,” http://anon.new mediamill.speedera.net/anon.newmediamill/ads/FMA.jpg (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TvV0ddBY). 53 Glenn Garvin, “A Case of Taste: Shifting norms and the popularity of cable TV have pushed the boundaries of sex, violence and language on the tube. But how far is too far?” Miami Herald, June 9, 2002, http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/news/2002/cable_miamiherald.htm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TvZmXQp4). 77 In response to the Parents Television Council’s narrative of cultural decline, advocates of the first amendment express a counter-narrative similar to the one employed by LGBT advocates of same-sex marriage. Here, instead of viewing the increasing permissiveness of popular culture, particularly television, as a negative trend that forecasts the downfall of western civilization, as the PTC tends to do, activists see increasing freedom of expression. This narrative of progress celebrates the fact that you can say and do much more on television than you could in the past. And it is not just about the presence or absence of profanity, sexuality, or violence. Progress is also seen in the inclusion of topics – such as teenage pregnancy or interracial relationships – and characters – particularly non-straight or transgendered persons – that have been censored by network television in the past. Where the PTC might fault a program for portraying physical abuse or a severely dysfunctional family, the counter-narrative of artistic progress might applaud the same program for its gritty realism or commitment to highlighting significant social issues. First amendment activists, civil liberties advocates, and media scholars question both the desirability and efficacy of the censorship practices that result from cultural anxieties regarding the exposure of children to indecent materials. Many of those opposed to the Parents Television Council criticize the connection between child protectionism and indecency regulation, pointing to the many court decisions and media policies regarding what can be shown or broadcast when children are 78 likely to be in the audience. 54 The PTC’s calls for internal and external regulation of network television are based on this connection (the organization’s official motto is “because our children are watching”), 55 which is disputed by those who believe that programming intended for and enjoyed by actual adults should not be censored or sanitized on behalf of a hypothetical child. Media scholars and activists have also emphasized the difficulty of determining what is obscene and what is indecent at any given cultural moment, often citing the now infamous quote by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who, after admitting that he could not define obscenity, simply said: “I know it when I see it.” 56 In Dirty Discourse, a study of the regulation of sex and indecency in broadcasting, authors Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith remind their readers that the Federal Communications Commission relies on a decades-old Supreme Court decision to define indecency and obscenity, which “still leaves the meanings cloudy and confused.” 57 Civil liberties activist and scholar Marjorie Heins argues that the public has an equally difficult time deciding which types of media content are and are not harmful to minors: “Even if adults could 54 See FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), Action for Children’s Television v. FCC, 58 F. 3d 654 (1995), and the Children’s Television Act of 1990. 55 Parents Television Council, “Parents Television Council - Because Our Children Are Watching,” http://www.parentstv.org (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5XilM9WwF). 56 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). 57 Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith, Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in Broadcasting, 2 nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 2. 79 agree, moreover, on what is truly inadvisable for young people, the rarely asked question remains, In what sense is it harmful? And does it justify censorship?” 58 In fact, some have made the argument that children are actually harmed by practices of child protectionism. In writing about how the politics of fear and child protectionism impact the sexual health of children and families, journalist and free- speech activist Judith Levine argues that child protectionists often accomplish the opposite of what they are trying to do. “Indeed, the sexual politics of fear is harmful to minors,” Levine writes, precisely because it denies them the knowledge and open communication necessary for smart sexual choices. 59 Other activists and scholars second Levine’s assertion that protecting the innocence of children is detrimental to their growth and development. Much has been written, for instance, on the value of the violence, sex, and other “adult content” that filled children’s fairy tales in the past. 60 According to these authors, children benefited from being able to explore and reflect on the realities of adult life in the safe space of oral histories or literature. The same logic occurs in contemporary arguments against shielding children from 58 Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the Children, 5. 59 Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, xx-xxi. 60 Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, “Introduction,” in In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences, ed. Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 1-14; Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); Alison Lurie, “Fairy Tale Liberation,” The New York Review of Books (December 17, 1970): 42-44; Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin, Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction (London & New York: Verso, 1987); Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Routledge, 2006); Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge, 2002). 80 profanity, violence, and sex – that child protectionism and censorship are making our children woefully under-prepared for the realities of the adult world. Take, for example, an entry from The Technology Liberation Front, a blog devoted to countering the over-regulation and censorship of traditional and new media. In this post, entitled “Parents Television Council = Bad Parenting,” first amendment advocate Adam Thierer argues that the parental control technologies and child protectionism policies advocated by the PTC do more harm than good: The world is full of coarse language, mature themes, sexual perversion and much else […] Now I’m not advocating parents sit down with their toddlers and watch an endless stream of adult-oriented programming on TV, but I do believe that a gradual assimilation into the realities of this world makes sense. I want to be there with my kids to help answer tough questions when they come up. Or I might actually preempt their questions by discussing mature subjects with them before I allow them to view certain types of programming with me. This is called parental responsibility. It’s not an easy job. […] But just because we might object to some of those sights and sounds, that does not make it alright for us to call the government in to censors [sic] those sights and sounds out of existence. Denying reality does not make reality go away. 61 Thierer’s post taps into a key conflict between the idealism of decency crusaders, who believe that the corruption of innocence can be prevented or substantially reduced through the regulation of popular culture, and the realism of their opponents, who argue that it is futile and foolish to try to protect children from every frightening, sexual, or crass image. Significantly, while opponents of the Parents Television Council will often reference this idealism by referring to the group as 61 Adam Thierer, “Parents Television Council = Bad Parenting,” The Technology Liberation Front, http://www.techliberation.com/archives/015959.php (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TwJTSkSu). 81 hopelessly nostalgic, rarely do these activists directly challenge the rhetoric of nostalgia itself. Instead, they opt to reframe the PTC’s nostalgic celebration of past programming and decency standards as a regressive Puritanism, which is out of touch with contemporary social norms. Forecasting the Future of Family Values The bulk of this chapter has described the various ways in which the nostalgia facet of the “family values” ideograph is used to constructed an idealized past in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, how this nostalgia functions to erase certain historical facts and groups of people from the collective memory, and how LGBT rights activists and decency crusade opponents challenge the narratives of decline inherent to this nostalgia. The rest of the chapter considers how these varying constructions of the past are used to both pass judgment on the present and to make predictions about the future. As we might anticipate from the texts analyzed thus far, nostalgic narratives of decline tend to produce very different visions of the future than the anti-nostalgic narratives of progress offered by LGBT rights and first amendment activists, and therefore tend to support very different, if not oppositional, calls for action. The first half of this section will consider the conflicting dystopic and utopic visions of the future that constitute the same-sex marriage debate. The second half documents how the same clash occurs in the media decency debate, and discusses how these visions of the future inform media policy. 82 The Future of Family in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate As discussed above, conservative family values discourse is characterized by a nostalgic longing for an idealized past, when the dominance of the nuclear family provided Americans with both social stability and financial security, when parents invested time in their children, and when children grew up with a strong sense of personal values. According to these activists, the traditional family has been on the decline ever since, with marriage falling out of favor, divorce becoming increasingly acceptable, and non-traditional family structures exposing children to a diversity of social and psychological harm. 62 Given the idealization of the past in the rhetoric of family values, it is not surprising that conservatives view the present state of American society with contempt, and the future of the American family with such trepidation. When the past is so bright that it overshadows the present, the future is bound to look dim. We see these dystopic visions in the discourse of conservative activists concerned about family trends. In a January 2000 newsletter to supporters aptly titled, “The Future of the Family: Dr. James Dobson Looks Ahead to the New Millennium,” the Focus on the Family founder paints a gloomy picture of the future of traditional marriage and parenthood, and the future of American society: I wish it were not necessary to share these discouraging trends and predictions about the family in North America, but this is a reality. If traditional marriage and parenthood continue to lose ground year by year, marriage and parenthood as we have known them will soon die. That would mean absolute chaos for mankind. Societies can be no more stable than the 62 See Focus on the Family, “Marriage and Family Defense: Understanding The Issues that Affect Your Family,” http://www.family.org/socialissues/Marriage/ (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5U06t9q32). 83 social foundation on which they sit. That foundation is the traditional family, defined as one man and one woman living together in a committed, loving marriage. If that institution crumbles, the entire superstructure of ordered society is destined to collapse. 63 Dobson extrapolates from current trends in cohabitation, divorce, and single parenthood, and cites futurists who predict the end of traditional family life, to construct a vision of the future that would be understandably upsetting to Focus on the Family supporters – a future in which single women will reproduce through cloning, couples will perfect their offspring through genetic engineering, individuals will routinely move through a series of marriages, and children will be raised in communal settings, with or without their biological parents. 64 According to Dobson, these radical social changes will rip the fabric of society apart, creating chaos. The rhetorical power of this passage relies on both the nostalgia that informs conservative family values activists’ depictions of the past, and on the connection between family and culture embedded in conservative family values discourse. Recall that, from this ideological perspective, the stability of society depends on the stability of the family. Social ills like poverty, violent crime, or juvenile delinquency are the result of families being fractured by divorce or strained by single parenthood. Poor school performance in certain minority communities is therefore the result of poor parenting. If society is fraying at the edges, then it is because the American 63 James C. Dobson, “The Future of the Family: Dr. James Dobson Looks Ahead To The New Millennium,” Focus on the Family, http://www.focusonthefamily.com/docstudy/newsletters/ A000000794.cfm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5TwXMXmE5). 64 Ibid. 84 family, which provides the foundation for all social ties, is in trouble. To these activists, the diversification of family structures is not an adaptation to social pressures and structural problems, but a symptom of the decline of the traditional family and a precursor to the decline of western society. This belief is quite clear in the same-sex marriage debate. In an April 2004 Focus on the Family newsletter, published just before same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, Dobson issued this warning: “Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.” 65 Nostalgia for the security of the past is a natural response to the insecurity of the future. But Dobson and other family values activists are not just longing for a time when the nuclear family was the norm, but also for a time when society would never even entertain the idea of same-sex marriage and families. “Image how the culture would have reacted 50 years ago to the assertion that two lesbians or two gay men could replace a child’s mother or father,” Dobson reminds supporters in a January 2007 newsletter. “How times have changed.” 66 Public opinion on gay and lesbian parenting has certainly shifted since the 1950s. And popular support is key to the battle over same-sex marriage. Will Americans accept the idea of same-sex marriage and parenting by extending marriage rights to LGBT individuals (or voting 65 James C. Dobson, “In Defending Marriage - Take the Offensive!” Focus on the Family, http:// www.focusonthefamily.com/docstudy/newsletters/A000000334.cfm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TwbX90RC). 66 James C. Dobson, “While the Debate Rages on, Children Pay the Price,” Focus on the Family, http://www.focusonthefamily.com/docstudy/newsletters/A000000702.cfm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TwdpwgnA). 85 against laws that seek to abolish such rights), or will they reject this idea through the passage of marriage amendments that limit the institution to one man and one woman? Conservative family values advocates hope to convince the public that they should opt for the latter choice, and that the “traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience, is still the foundation on which the well-being of future generations depends.” 67 They want the public to view same-sex marriage as the latest in a series of threats to the traditional family, and to make the idea of same- sex marriage and parenting as unthinkable as it was in the 1950s. These calls to actions are informed by a dystopic vision of a future in which LGBT individuals are fully accepted in society, and powered by an emotional undercurrent of nostalgia for the past. The desire to return to the way things were in the past, both demographically and ideologically, is reflected in the actions advocated by conservative family values activists – particularly in the statutes and constitutional amendments that would define marriage in the traditional sense once and for all, as the union of one man and one woman. “History, nature, social science, anthropology, religion, and theology all coalesce in vigorous support of marriage as it has always been understood: a life-long union of male and female for the purpose of creating stable families,” according to Focus on the Family’s position statement 67 James C. Dobson, “Two Mommies Is One Too Many,” Focus on the Family, http://www.citizen link.org/clcommentary/A000003415.cfm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5TwlEWM3z). 86 against same-sex marriage. 68 This perspective advocates a return to past practices as means for reversing the decline of the family in American society, thereby securing a better future for American society. It also relies on nostalgia to construct the past as an idealized space and time worth going back to. The previous section of this chapter documented how LGBT activists counter nostalgic recollections of the past and corresponding narratives of decline through counter-narratives of progress. For these activists, the “golden age” of traditional family values is more accurately characterized as a frightening time of intolerance, stigma, and violence. The passage of time has brought with it increasing levels of acceptance for LGBT individuals, a trend which has unsettled conservative activists but heartened those working to extend LGBT rights. In line with this narrative of progress, the vision of the future presented is decidedly utopian. Activists often speak of working to secure a “better future” for the LGBT community. A 2006 document on same-sex marriage and immigration, for instance, states that the testimonies of lesbian and gay families are “sometimes horrifying” but “always enlightening,” because they are the stories of “people simply seeking to build a better future…together.” 69 In a May 2005 forum on the social and political issues facing LGBT Americans, Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart invoked this 68 Focus on the Family, “Focus on the Family's Position Statement on Same-Sex 'Marriage' and Civil Unions,” http://www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/marriage/A000000985.cfm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TwmZXSOL). 69 Human Rights Campaign, “Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples Under U.S. Law,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/6918.htm (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TwpSvu49). 87 idea of working toward a “better future” by building the successes, both small and large, that the LGBT rights movement had already achieved: …the work that we're doing is not just about winning victories in the present, but really is about building a better future for young people in our community today, about changing the world in which we live, about giving hope – which I think is really important right now because, you know, a person could sometimes think these are hopeless times. But I don't think these are hopeless times because I see all of the work that's going on in communities across the country. I see the victories that we're winning. And our job is to remind people that all of these changes continue to happen. Many positive things continue to happen. As a community, today we're better off today than we were just a couple of years ago, certainly better off than we were five, 10, 20 years ago… 70 Here, Cathcart is constructing images of the past, present, and future that fit into a narrative of progress, one that has been made possible through LGBT activism and increasing levels of social acceptance. From this perspective, positive change continues to happen, and there are even better days ahead. In the narrative of decline constructed by conservative family values activists, a dystopic vision of the future calls for a codification of past practices, namely traditional marriage. In this counter- narrative of progress, however, legal bans on same-sex marriage appear as obstacles to a “better future” for LGBT Americans. The call to action implied and supported by this narrative is clear – marriage and parenting rights should be extended to gay and lesbian individuals. When asked about the future of the same-sex marriage debate, state-level activists on both sides were unsure about how it would eventually play out. Jeff 70 Lambda Legal, “2005 Liberty Address by Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart.” http://www.lambdalegal.org/our-work/2005-liberty-address-by.html (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Twb7jurS). 88 Laszloffy, president of the Montana Family Foundation and author of the 2004 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in Montana, said that he thought the national debate would last at least another ten years. 71 Christine Kaufmann, Montana state senator and director of the Montana Human Rights Network, was also uncertain about the future of the debate, saying that it was too early to tell if increasing public acceptance of the LGBT community would translate into marriage equality. 72 The overall success of state-level bans on same-sex marriage seems to suggest that voters have been persuaded by nostalgic narratives on the decline of the family, 73 but the failure of multiple versions of the federal marriage amendment leaves that interpretation open to debate. 74 It remains to be seen whether the American public will opt for stability or progress. The Future of Decency in Broadcasting Observers of the media decency debate have witnessed a similar clash between dystopic and utopic visions of the future, with media watchdog organizations like the Parents Television Council working diligently to stem what 71 Jeff Laszloffy (president and founder, Montana Family Foundation), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 72 Christine Kaufmann (director, Montana Human Rights Network), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 73 In the years since the federal Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) was signed into law, 48 states have enacted legal or constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. 74 While supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act enjoyed an easy passage in 1996, the Federal Marriage Amendment failed in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives in 2004. A new version of the amendment failed to pass in 2007. 89 they see as the rising tide of cultural decline. During an interview, Debra Timberlake, chapter director of the Bay Area PTC chapter, provided a colorful analogy to illustrate her organization’s understanding of the steady coarsening of popular culture. It was like boiling a frog, she said. If you throw the frog straight into a pot of boiling water, it will struggle to escape. But if you put the frog into water and gradually turn up the heat, it will not notice the difference until it is too late to get out. 75 Timberlake argues the contemporary viewers are equally unaware of the increasing indecency on both broadcast and cable television: It’s getting worse and we’re just not even realizing it’s happening. So there's a handful of people here and there that say, “Hey, does anybody see this?” or “When were you allowed to say this on TV?” […] I've had people come up to me and say, “I didn't know you could say the word 'bitch' on television.” But, you know, it's gone from before, where you wouldn't even think about it, now to where [it’s] okay. So now the next word is the F-word. And so, you know, pretty soon, if there aren't people fighting for a little bit of it, there's going to be no rules and it will be complete chaos. 76 Her description matches up with the general narrative of decline present in the Parents Television Council’s discourse. Here, the narrative culminates in a dystopic future that is void of all standards and regulation, one where audiences will have become so desensitized to indecency that they will be unfazed by hearing “the F- word” uttered regularly on network television. This negative understanding of tolerance is a key component of the nostalgic narratives of decline in both the media decency and same-sex marriage debates. 75 Debra Timberlake (chapter director, Bay Area Chapter of Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, November 2007. 76 Ibid. 90 Conservative opponents of same-sex marriage lament not only the proliferation of non-traditional families, but also the increasing social acceptance of this diversity. Decency crusaders worry about increases in profanity, violence, and sex in the media, as well as increasing public acceptance of this content. “With repeated exposure, even the most gruesome and grisly depictions of violence eventually seem tame,” states the Parents Television Council in a report on violence in primetime television. “In time, viewers become desensitized, so Hollywood has to keep pushing the envelope in order to elicit the same reaction.” 77 From the perspective of the PTC, members of the American public are far too nonchalant about the media that they are exposed to everyday. They fail to recognize rising levels of violence or increasingly graphic sexual content, and have become accustomed to the presence of profanity on television. The desire of these decency crusaders to alert the public to the decline in popular culture, to say, as Timberlake put it, “Hey, does anybody see this?” is reflected in the many research studies and reports on indecency trends published and publicized by the Parents Television Council. 78 These texts provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for the group’s claims regarding indecency in contemporary media, while also highlighting the rapid increases in such content through trend 77 Parents Television Council, “TV Bloodbath: Violence on Prime Time Broadcast TV: A PTC State of the Television Industry Report,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/stateindustry violence/main.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5TwusUJNt). 78 Parents Television Council, “PTC Special Reports,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/ reports/welcome.asp accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5VXZwj2om). 91 analysis. 79 These data help the PTC to construct a narrative of decline, providing “documentation” for their opposition to contemporary culture. Decency crusaders are unhappy with the present state of popular culture, and similarly pessimistic about the future. Their narrative of decline, which contrasts nostalgic recollections of the golden age of television decency with the debauchery of modern programming, establishes a clear trajectory for the future of television: fewer and fewer standards or regulations, resulting in more and more indecent content. Their prediction is partly based on a corresponding decline in external oversight. When asked about the future of the media decency debate, almost every one of the PTC activists I interviewed insisted that, as long as the entertainment industry operates under a system of self-regulation, decency will continue to decline, because the media has no incentive to regulate itself. 80 Viewers in the most desirable demographic ranges (most often 18 to 34-year-old males) are not looking for the family friendly programming the Parents Television Council endorses; they tend to seek out edgier fare. In order to remain competitive, network television has had to respond with programming similar to cable. The free market ideology surrounding media content has intensified what PTC spokesperson Laura Mahaney refers to as a 79 See, for example, Caroline Schulenburg, “Dying to Entertain: Violence on Prime Time Broadcast Television 1998-2006,” Parents Television Council, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/ reports/violencestudy/exsummary.asp (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5U08wK76p). 80 Melissa Henson (director of research, Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, October 2007; Debra Timberlake (chapter director, Bay Area Chapter of Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, November 2007. 92 “race to the bottom of the barrel.” 81 In an effort to compete with cable and paid premium channels such as Showtime and HBO, network television is becoming less family friendly. 82 Without more external regulation, say decency activists, the entertainment industry will keep “pushing the envelope,” prompting viewers to become more and more desensitized to the culture that is heating up around them. Just as conservative family values activists see themselves as the last line of defense against the destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family, decency crusaders view their work toward more substantial regulation and stricter enforcement as the only thing standing between the present state of popular culture and complete chaos. Both debates illustrate the rhetorical function of the nostalgic facet of the family values ideograph: discourses of nostalgia construct an idealized version of the past, creating an emotional longing for the way that things used to be. By contrasting this idealized past with the problems of the present, conservative family values advocates are able construct a narrative of decline that suggests a dystopic future. This future – where individuals will be able to marry whomever or whatever they want, and the media will be able to say and do anything that it wants – can only be prevented by returning to the standards and the practices of the past, by defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, or endowing the FCC and consumers with greater power over the media. The various “calls to action” 81 “Lou Dobbs Tonight: January 12, 2004,” CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0401/ 12/ldt.00.html (accessed December 10, 2007 & archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5U09MPch4). 82 Ibid. 93 issued by the Parents Television Council seek to do just that – to exert more control over popular culture through FCC complaints, 83 congressional lobbying, 84 and public information campaigns. 85 These actions are intended to reign in broadcast indecency, making television more like it used to be – family focused and family friendly. Opposition to these decency crusades is far less organized, and scattered across the ideological spectrum, resulting in a much less cohesive vision of the future on the opposite side of the media decency debate. Not everyone invests in the counter-narrative of progress, which sees a future filled with increasing freedoms of expression. Many opponents do worry about their children being exposed to sex, violence, and adult themes on television. 86 But they disagree with what they see as the Parents Television Council’s push to sanitize popular culture by telling the media, government, and the American public what should and should not be aired on television. This point of clash has resulted in a competing dystopic discourse, one that portrays the PTC and other media watchdogs as 1984-esque thought police. As 83 Parents Television Council, “File an Official Indecency Complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Now,” https://www.parentstv.org/PTC/fcc/fcccomplaint.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXaJ324n). 84 Parents Television Council, “PTC Urges FCC and Congress to Listen to Consumers, Not Industry Lobbyists,” November 28, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2007/1128.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXa9L1FL). 85 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council is Working to Help You and Your Family Make Better Viewing Decisions…What’s on TV for Your Family Tonight?” http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/familyguide/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXZoGhwk). 86 Jonathan Rintels, “The ‘Indecency’ Fraud,” The Huffington Post, May 26, 2006, http://www. huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-rintels/the-indecency-fraud_b_21647.html (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TyTmYPrP). 94 blogger Jonathan Rintels wrote in a Huffington Post critique of the PTC, parents “understand they don’t need to rely on Big Brother censoring the tube to raise their children as they wish.” 87 The contrast between this dystopia and the vision of the future presented by decency crusaders reveals an important distinction between the goals of each side of the media decency debate. Organizations like the Parents Television Council are seeking to reduce indecency in popular culture, while their opponents are mostly trying to reduce the impact of decency crusaders on popular culture and media policy. Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Public Policy Ideographs like “family values” function as warrants or justifications for particular actions because they contain pieces of ideology that provoke an emotional response. This chapter has argued that nostalgia is one of the key facets of the family values ideograph, and discussed how discourses of nostalgia create positive feelings for the past through the erasure of anything that would disrupt conservatives’ idealized construction of this space and time. But nostalgia also involves feelings of melancholia and homesickness, 88 painful longings for the past that prompt discontent with the present. It is this dissatisfaction, with the disintegration of the traditional family or the content of the media, that welcomes solutions that seek to make things 87 Rintels, “The ‘Indecency’ Fraud.” 88 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; Davis, Yearning for Yesterday. 95 more like the way they used to be. Deliberation over policies like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), state-level marriage statutes or constitutional amendments, and the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act has been greatly influenced by the nostalgia of the family values ideograph. This discourse is clearly striking an emotional chord with both legislators and voters. But what are the implications of using nostalgia as a rhetorical tactic in the deliberation of public policy? Some scholars of deliberative democracy have argued that emotional appeals have little to no place in the deliberation of public issues, as they do not meet the conditions of rational argument – they cannot be subject to reasoned debate and may therefore cloud the judgment of those participating in the deliberative process. 89 Other theorists have argued that the process of deliberative democracy benefits from the inclusion and valuing of emotion. 90 Your opinion on the validity of the emotional appeal of nostalgia in the same-sex marriage or media decency debates depends on which side of the debate you find yourself. Of more significant concern is the use of nostalgia’s strategic construction of the past. The decision-making that occurs during 89 Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, ed. Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 17-34; David B. Hershenov, “Two Epistemic Accounts of Democratic Legitimacy,” Polity 37 (2005): 216-234; Bernard Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 338-368; Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett, “The Emotional Dynamics of Deliberative Democracy,” Policy and Politics 29 (2001): 351-364. 90 Lincoln Dahlberg, “The Habermasian Public Sphere: Taking Difference Seriously,” Theory and Society 34 (2005): 111-136; Jane Mansbridge, Janette Hartz-Karp, Matthew Amengual, and John Gastil, “Norms of Deliberation: An Inductive Study,” Journal of Public Deliberation 2 (2006): http://services.bepress.com/jpd/vol2/iss1/art7; Bas Van Stokkom, “Deliberative Group Dynamics: Power, Status and Affect in Interactive Policy Making,” Policy and Politics 33 (2003): 387-409. 96 the process of deliberation is most often orientated toward the future. 91 In the same- sex marriage debate for instance, voters and policy makers are attempting to decide what will and will not get to count as marriage in the future. In the decency debate, activists and government officials are trying to influence what will and will not be tolerated in popular culture. But even though these debates are concerned with the present and focused on the future, they both rely on guidance and examples from the past to better predict what will happen in the future. Because the future is always uncertain, effective deliberation relies on the consideration of both positive and negative elements of our collective past. When deliberation is infused with nostalgia, however, as it has been in these particular cultural debates, we risk losing sight of certain elements of the past. This is precisely the argument that social historian Stephanie Coontz is making when she states that policy makers have neglected to consider the role that structural factors, such as a strong social safety net, played in making the success of the 1950s nuclear family possible. 92 By erasing the structural factors, nostalgia has contributed to an idealistic focus on personal agency in social welfare policy, idealism that has had a negative material impact on many families. 93 91 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (London: W. Heinemann, 1926). 92 Coontz, The Way We Never Were. 93 Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>.” 97 Conclusion This chapter has considered how the focus on nostalgia in the rhetoric of family values has enabled conservative activists to articulate narratives of decline that position contemporary culture in a negative light, and result in dystopic visions of the future that can only be prevented through the enactment of conservative social policies. It also documented two major strategies of opposition employed by scholars, LGBT activists, and the various opponents of media decency crusaders – challenging conservative’s idealized image of the past with historical evidence, and working to construct a counter-narrative a progress that speaks of better days ahead. Finally, it considered the rhetorical implications of using an idealized past to deliberate on public policy. Conservative family values activists have presented these policies as a means for getting back to the way things used to be, when children listened to their elders, and parents – rather than the media – were the source of worldly knowledge. These policies aim to restore the authority of the traditional family and the parents who head it. This concept of moral authority, which is another major facet of the family values ideograph, will be explored in the next chapter. 98 Chapter 3: Focus on Moral Authority Activists in both the media decency debate and the same-sex marriage debate frame their campaigns in terms of their commitment to the welfare of children. As I pointed out in the introduction, the trope of the child – which has come to signify both existing and hypothetical, yet-to-be-born, children – is a major component of the rhetoric of “family values.” In the same-sex marriage debate, LGBT individuals are often stigmatized or vilified by the conservative assertion that they endanger the welfare of children, 1 and therefore the very future of society. 2 In the decency debate, conservative activists are similarly concerned with the negative influence of a non- traditional “other” in the home. In this case, however, that “other” is the media. The parallels between the discursive construction of LGBT parents by conservative opponents of same-sex marriage and the discursive construction of the media by decency crusaders are striking. Both “others” are considered to be poor sources of moral authority for children, especially in comparison to the traditional family idealized by conservatives, and both have been accused of robbing children of their innocence by given them early access to the world of adult sexuality. This chapter will explore how these concerns with moral authority manifest themselves in the rhetoric of “family values.” It starts by historicizing the current 1 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 2 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 99 view of media technologies as usurpers of parental authority and corruptors of children, and considering the influence of child protectionism on the regulation of media content in key court decisions and media policies. After establishing the historical context of current anxieties over children and media, it looks at how moral authority is used as a rhetorical tactic in the discourse of decency crusaders. The second half of the chapter considers how the same tactic is deployed and contested in the same-sex marriage debate, where activists on both sides have marshaled large bodies of social scientific evidence in order to “prove” what is best for children. Decency and Technologies of Moral Authority Over the past fifteen to twenty years, the rhetoric surrounding new media technologies has vacillated wildly between promise and peril, heralding new opportunities, highlighting new dangers, a driving the production of new media technologies: Leapfrog game systems, Grand Theft Auto, Baby Einstein, ClearPlay, family friendly channels and educational programming, adult entertainment on cable television, ratings systems, V-chips, Sky Angel, time-shifting late night programs through digital video recorders, TiVo’s KidZone, virtual tutors and homework help via the information superhighway, easy access to internet pornography, Net Nanny and Cyber Sitter, online bullying, and MySpace predators. Technologies such as these have been both the subject and the result of this rhetoric, illustrating how we seek to safeguard children and teenagers from technological threats through the invention of newer, more advanced technologies of surveillance and control. 100 The fear of technology’s negative impact on impressionable minds is not new. From silent films to talkies, from novels to comic books, from television to videogames to the Internet, new technologies have prompted reactions ranging from parental concern to moral outrage. And while the technologies may change, the fears remain remarkably consistent. We fear that new technologies will ideologically indoctrinate unsuspecting segments of the population, or lead to copycat behavior. We fear that new technologies will turn our obedient and industrious children into empty-eyed coach potatoes, or hyperactive little monsters. Most significantly, we fear that new technologies will permit children access to content and knowledge that they are not mature enough to understand, access which is seen as a threat to the physical or psychological health of children, as well as the ability of parents to act as gatekeepers and dispensers of worldly knowledge. The belief that children need to be protected from indecency, profanity, obscenity, and other “adult materials” has become part of the ideological fabric of Western civilization, and can be traced back as far as Plato’s Republic. According to Plato, an ideal society was one that protected fragile young minds from the corruptive influence of certain artistic creations and adult knowledge. Almost 2500 years later, we still find ourselves wishing that children could remain children for just a bit longer, blaming our media for the “adultification” of youth, 3 and the social or psychological problems that can result from knowing too much, too soon. “Kids have information but not necessarily the emotional maturity to absorb the 3 Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 101 information,” laments Dr. David Walsh, of the National Institute on Media and the Family. “We’ve got kids who are at the simple arithmetic phase in terms of their emotional maturity dealing with quadratic material.” 4 New media technologies have given children access to this “quadratic material,” and cut parents out of the equation. Prior to personal media technologies such as radio, television, video, or the Internet, parents had much more control over what children read or watched. The arrival of each technological innovation threatened to make both its predecessors and parents obsolete. Or, as media theorists Cary Balzalgette and David Buckingham argue: “The threat which has been posed by each successive technological development – most notably by television and video – has derived from the fact that they seem to offer less and less control for adults.” 5 This loss of control stems from two separate, but interrelated, forces: the shifting of technological agency from adults to children and the shifting of moral authority from parents to the media. Using the Parents Television Council’s representation and employment of new media technologies as an entry point, this section explores how both of these forces have impacted the current debate over media decency in the United States, and how the rhetoric of “family values” is deployed by decency crusaders in a way that highlights the moral authority of parents. It will situate today’s debate in the 4 As quoted in Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Grade-School Girls, Grown-Up Gossip,” New York Times, May 27, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/fashion/27gossip.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VWOX5cg0). 5 Cary Balzalgette and David Buckingham, eds., In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences (London: British Film Institute, 1995). 102 context of past media decency crusades, consider the impact of this concern with moral authority on several key pieces of media policy, and document how new technologies are used, both pragmatically and rhetorically, to shift technological agency and moral authority back to parents. Child Protectionism and the Media Writing in the fourth century B.C., Plato penned a critique of poetry, rhetoric, and other arts that would sound familiar to most contemporary Americans, even those who have never read the ancient Greek philosopher. Written in an era well before any electronic media existed, The Republic, Plato’s philosophical treatise on the ideal society, anticipates both the perspectives and tactics of present day media decency crusaders: protecting the impressionable minds of children is essential to producing ideal citizens, and all art forms should be subject to surveillance and censorship, lest something slip through that could set a bad example for our youth. This discourse of child protectionism is clearly articulated in The Republic: Then shall we carelessly allow the children to hear any old stories, told by just anyone, and to take beliefs into their souls that are for the most part opposite to the ones we think they should hold when they are grown up? We certainly won’t. Then we must first of all, it seems, supervise the storytellers. We’ll select their stories whenever they are fine or beautiful and reject them when they aren’t. And we’ll persuade nurses and mothers to tell their children the ones we have selected, since they will shape their children’s souls with stories much more than they shape their bodies by handling them. Many of the stories they tell now, however, must be thrown out. 6 6 Plato, “The Republic,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 1016. 103 This understanding of the media assumes a direct connection between the individual’s mind and the culture he or she is exposed to, hence the equation of “hearing” and “receive into their minds” in this passage. According to the Platonic perspective, everything we see and hear is internalized in some way, thus exposing children to bad ideas produces bad children, who grow up to be bad adults. Media scholars, along with many if not most Americans, have rejected this Platonic view of media effects, despite its reappearance in early propaganda studies (which suggested a “magic bullet,” “hypodermic needle,” or otherwise uniform mass effect of media messages) and the Frankfurt School’s writings on the culture industry. 7 Audience reception studies have revealed numerous mitigating factors that affect our relationship with the sounds and images we encounter in daily life, differences that produce a diversity of reading strategies and practices. 8 But while we have generally moved beyond an unmitigated, uniform-effects model of media consumption by adults, we retain a more simplistic view of the media’s effect on children. 9 Exposure to profanity, violence, and sexually charged media content is 7 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Blackwell Verso, 1997), 120-167; Elihu Katz and Pail F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955). 8 See Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Media Studies: A Reader, ed. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 51-61; Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: “The Cosby Show,” Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); David Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992). 9 Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents & Children in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 104 seen, in American society at least, as universally harmful to children. Marjorie Heins, activist and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project, has identified three common popular beliefs underlying this “harm-to-minors” assumption: that media exposure leads to developmental and psychological problems in children (ranging from anxiety and nightmares to hyper-sexualization), that children will mimic the violent actions or sexual behavior they see in the media, and that the media robs children of their innocence far too soon. 10 Here we reencounter the Platonic view of the child, as a tabula rasa on which both good and bad traits can be inscribed. But, as I discussed in chapter one, the idea of children being robbed of their innocence by forces outside of the family is a particularly modern notion, generally attributed to the emergence of Romantic ideals of the child in the mid-18 th century. 11 After centuries of children being seen as smaller, immature versions of adults, or unruly troublemakers that had to be civilized before they could enter adult society, the child came to stand in for innocence, purity, and the sanctity of family life that new technologies of industrialization threatened. 12 In the Romantics’ reverential view of childhood, the child came to represent a sense of nostalgia or longing for something more authentic and natural, specifically a pre- 10 Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 11 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). 12 C. John Sommerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (London: Sage, 1982). 105 industrial time and place. 13 In the Victorian era, social anxieties surrounding “libidinous thoughts” and masturbation prompted parents to shield their children from any and all sexual information or behavior. 14 This new vision of the child, as an innocent who needed to be protected from the “adult secrets” of sex, violence, and greed, served as the basis of calls for child protectionism in public debates, and influenced public policy, much as it does today. Regulating (In)Decency The desire to protect children from forbidden knowledge and the harsh realities of the adult world has been complicated by the increasingly ubiquitous existence of media. As soon as children are old enough to understand what they hear from the radio or see on television, as soon as they can read newspapers or process advertisements, they are able to gain access to a whole new world of information and experiences, beyond the limits and restrictions that their parents or guardians might want to impose on such knowledge. Anxiety over children’s consumption of media has been a recurring theme in 20 th and 21 st century America. A key moment in the history of mass public concern over media effects and children came in the 1930s, with the emergence of the comic book. Initially, comic books were criticized primarily for their vulgar content. But by the 1940s, a prominent psychiatrist had 13 Ibid. 14 Colin Shaw, Deciding What We Watch: Taste, Decency, and Media Ethics in the UK and the USA (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 106 linked comic books with juvenile delinquency, ostensibly because the stories provided children with “bad ideas.” Comic books were literally put on trial during the 1940s, when a senate subcommittee was formed in order to investigate the effects of comic books on the nation’s children. 15 The Comic Book Code, which was voluntarily adopted by comic book publishers in the 1940s, was established partly to mollify the industry’s public critics, but mostly to avoid government regulation. 16 The investigation and its outcome set the tone for future media decency crusades: Increasing cultural anxiety prompts congressional hearing, expert witnesses are called in to testify on media effects, members of Congress chastise the media, and the industry adopts a code of self-censorship to avoid external regulation. With the mass adoption of television after World War II, regulation became inevitable. While there had certainly been significant levels of public concern regarding the subversive or corruptive influence of film on both adults and children, these worries would become quaint and trivial in comparison to the debates that were about to take place over the purported effects of television. Although film had been associated with political propaganda, 17 television came directly into the home, violating the boundary between public and private that was meant to insulate the family from external forces, and protect children from corruption by the outside 15 David W. Park, “The Kefauver Comic Book Hearings as Show Trial: Decency, Authority, and the Dominated Expert,” Cultural Studies 16:2 (2002): 259-288. 16 Ibid. 17 Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 2000). 107 world. 18 Owning a television meant that even the youngest children in the household could become part of the media audience, so long as their playpens were kept close enough to the family’s set. With comic books, parents and other adult authority figures had worried that good children would be corrupted by bad ideas and vulgar content. The presence of television in the home brought a new concern – that children would be harmed by exposures to content they were not mature enough to understand. Ironically, the unparalleled consumerism that brought television sets into the kitchens, living rooms, and other private spaces of the American home – consumption made possible through a manufacturing boom in the post-war United States economy – had managed to bring us back to the vision of the naïve, innocent child that accompanied the Romantic’s critique of industrialism. Concern with media content and influence is not always about the effect of media on children. Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, most of the heated public and judicial debates regarding definitions of obscenity and indecency in the United States revolved around the question of what was offensive to adults, or whether a piece of art or literature violated contemporary community standards. In Miller v. California (1973), a landmark Supreme Court case that deemed certain types of obscene speech to be unprotected by the First Amendment, the three-prong test that all obscenity charges must meet does not even mention children: 18 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 108 1. An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. 2. The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory conduct. 3. The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. 19 The Federal Communications Commission’s working definition of indecency, as language or content that “depicts or describes in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs,” 20 is similarly silent on the subject of children. But child protectionism has served as the basis for a number of significant court decisions that impacted what broadcasters can air, and when they can air it. 21 Ginsberg v New York (1968) made it possible to prosecute businesses, organizations, or individuals for distributing obscene materials to minors. 22 FCC v. Pacifica (1978), in which the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s right to restrict the broadcast of indecent language or material in spite of the protections of such speech afforded by the First Amendment, was based on the perceived necessity of protecting minors 19 Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). 20 Federal Communications Commission, “Obscene, Indecent, and Profane Broadcasts,” FCC Consumer Facts, September 24, 2007, http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/obscene.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXVPXaK5). 21 Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children. 22 Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629 (1968). 109 from indecency. 23 The FCC v. Pacifica case originated from the complaint of a single parent in 1973, whose child had heard comedian George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue broadcast one afternoon over a Pacifica FM station in New York City. 24 After reviewing the monologue, the FCC sent a formal reprimand to the station. No fines were issued, but the reprimand implied that future complaints could result in the FCC revoking the station’s license. Pacifica appealed the decision, arguing that the monologue was a piece of social satire that did not appeal to the prurient interest. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the FCC’s decision, citing concerns about censorship, but the Supreme Court agreed with the FCC that the government had a compelling interest in protecting children from patently offensive content, and upheld the FCC’s right to prohibit the broadcast of indecent material during certain hours of the day, particularly afternoons and early evenings, when children were likely to be in the audience. 25 The Court’s decision cites both the intrusion of broadcasting into the private sphere of the home and the necessity of maintaining parental authority: Among the reasons for specially treating indecent broadcasting is the uniquely pervasive presence that medium of expression occupies in the lives of our people. Broadcasts extend into the privacy of the home, and it is impossible completely to avoid those that are patently offensive. Broadcasting, moreover, is uniquely accessible to children, even to those too young to read […] We held in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629, that the government's interest in the “well-being of its youth” and in supporting 23 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation 438 U.S. 726 (1978). 24 Robert L. Hilliard and Michael C. Keith, Dirty Discourse: Sex and Indecency in Broadcasting (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). 25 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978). 110 “parents' claim to authority in their own household” justified the regulation of otherwise protected expression. The ease with which children may obtain access to broadcast material, coupled with the concerns recognized in Ginsberg, amply justify special treatment of indecent broadcasting. 26 Sensing increasing public concern over the impact of media on children in the 1960s and 1970s, broadcasters attempted to prevent additional governmental oversight by adopting a more family friendly orientation. In 1975, all three of the major U.S. broadcasting companies, ABC, CBS, and NBC, adopted a self-imposed ban on programming considered unsuitable for family viewing in the first hour of primetime – 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern/Pacific. The family-viewing hour, or “family hour” as it came to be called, was the broadcasting industry’s response to the public and Congressional pressure that had been generated by the Surgeon General’s Report of 1972. 27 The report linked repeated exposure to violence on television with increased aggressiveness in children, and gave new scientific weight to the age-old fear that children would mimic what they saw on the screen. 28 Instead of disputing the link, the networks opted to rearrange their program schedules, pushing their most popular shows into later timeslots. But the change did not last. In 1976, the Writers’ Guild of America challenged the family hour, claiming that it interfered with their right to 26 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978). 27 George A. Comstock & Eli A. Rubinstein, eds., Television and Social Behavior: A Technical Report to the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972). 28 Shaw, Deciding What We Watch. 111 free expression. 29 A California circuit court declared it unconstitutional in 1970, and the family hour had disappeared from the broadcasting schedule by the 1980s. The elimination of the family hour was part of a larger push toward of the deregulation of media in the 1980s, resulting in a free-market approach to the ownership of media companies and the quality of media content. At the end of this decade, however, policy makers decided that an unregulated media economy was failing the nation’s children, who were watching more and more of what media critics considered to be low-quality programming. In response to this trend, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act (CTA) in 1990, which mandated an increase in the amount of educational and informational programming broadcast for children. According to an FCC fact sheet on the CTA, market forces “had not produced an adequate amount of children’s educational and informational programming on commercial television,” so “government action was needed to increase the availability of such programming.” 30 Under the CTA, broadcast stations must air a minimum of 3 hours of core educational programming per week, must identity educational or informational programming clearly to parents, and must prepare and issue reports on this programming to the public on a regular basis. 31 29 Shaw, Deciding What We Watch. 30 Federal Communications Commission, “Children’s Television Programming,” Fact Sheets, April 1995, http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Factsheets/kidstv.txt (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXXFLvtX). 31 Children’s Television Act of 1990, H.R, 1677. 112 Mandating better or more educational programming for children may seem to relate only tangentially to previously mentioned concerns over children being exposed to violent and/or sexually charged media content, but the Children’s Television Act reflects the same tension between free expression and the desire to legislate media content on behalf of children. The family hour was conceived as a means of protecting children from the harms associated with exposure to adult content, but could not survive a First Amendment challenge. The loss of this regulation, superficial as it might have been, helped usher in almost a decade of relative freedom from governmental interference in broadcast content. But the pendulum had swung back by the end of the 1980s, when the presence of children in the audience was again considered a compelling reason to regulate what was being shown on television. Capitalizing on the momentum generated by the successful passage of previous child protection legislation, and increasing parental concern over children’s access to the Internet, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. It was Part V of the new Telecommunications Act, which aimed to extend the obscenity and indecency standards applied to broadcast television to new media such as cable and the Internet. 32 The CDA made it a felony to transmit “obscene” or “indecent” materials to any person under the age of 18. The measure was highly controversial, with opponents arguing that the CDA jeopardized the freedom of 32 Communications Decency Act is Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, H.R. 104. 113 expression that the Internet had come to embody, 33 and proponents arguing that the CDA was necessary to protect children from both online pornography and the sexual predators lurking in cyberspace. 34 Once again, anxieties over possible harm to children outweighed concerns about First Amendment rights. Massive protests followed, and the Supreme Court agreed that Congress had taken the regulation of speech too far. The Court overturned the CDA in 1997. 35 In terms of the technology of moral authority, one of the most relevant aspects of the Communications Decency Act to survive the demise of the legislation was the federal requirement that television manufacturers install “V-chips” in every new television set. Using a predetermined ratings system, this chip would help parents to block objectionable content from coming into the home. 36 The introduction and subsequent adoption of the V-chip technology highlighted an additional, private anxiety that lingered under the surface of most public claims regarding indecency and technology. Cultural studies scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that this anxiety is “a fear that doesn’t necessarily concern the child at all, but rather parents themselves: the fear that the increasing expertise children are 33 “The Case Against the Communications Decency Act: Brave New Medium: Opponents Fought CDA on First Amendment Grounds,” CNN, March 1997, http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/cda.scotus/ against/index.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5VXYeZgvN). 34 “The Case For the Communications Decency Act: To Save the Children, CDA Supporters Cited Internet’s Threat to Minors,” CNN, March 1997, http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/cda.scotus/for/index. html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXYQWOiu). 35 Hilliard and Keith, Dirty Discourse. 36 Communications Decency Act of 1996. 114 demonstrating in their use of technology renders parental guidance ineffective if not obsolete.” 37 Although they desire to protect their children from every possible harm, parents often find themselves incapable of monitoring content when it is accessed through technology they do not fully understand. Or, as Donna Rice Hughes, communications director for anti-pornography organization Enough is Enough, stated during the debate over CDA in 1996, “We can’t expect parents to supervise their kids if they can’t set the clocks on their VCRs.” 38 The relationship between technological agency and moral authority is always shifting in response to new technological advances. Children and young adults adopt some type of new media technology, such as text messaging or instant messaging, and parents must grapple with the fact that they have lost some degree of control and a substantial amount of knowledge regarding who their child is communicating with. Sensing that their parental authority is threatened by this new development, they seek technological means for regaining control, like instant message logging programs, 39 or parental notifications of all call and SMS activity on the child’s mobile phone. 40 37 Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Surfin’ the Net: Children, Parental Obsolescence, and Citizenship,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, & Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 285-286. 38 As quoted in “The Case for the Communications Decency Act: To Save the Children, CDA Supporters Cited Internet’s Threat to Minors,” CNN. 39 See, for example, “RedHanded.Net,” an instant message logging software for parents (found at http://www.keylogger.bz/keylogger-redhanded-summ.htm, and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5VXZ3aekV). 40 Stefanie Olsen, “Software Lets Parents Monitor Kids’ Calls,” CNET News, July 10, 2007, http:// www.news.com/Software-lets-parents-monitor-kids-calls/2009-1025_3-6195666.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXZNEKul). 115 These computer chips, key-logging software programs, and surveillance services are what I will refer to as technologies of moral authority, which function to shift technological agency and moral authority back to parents. The Parents Television Council may be one of the best examples of the tension that exists between media decency, new technologies, and the moral authority of parents. Much of their discourse focuses on the detrimental effects new media have had on levels of decency in American popular culture, yet the organization relies heavily on the same technology, both to make its case to media policy makers, and to empower parents through technologies of moral authority. Moral Authority and “Family Friendly” Content While the term “family friendly” predominates the discourse of the Parents Television Council, in their publications, press releases, media appearances, and web resources, the group frequently uses the terms “family values” and “family friendly” interchangeably. In “Top 10” lists of the best and worst shows airing during primetime, sitcoms such as The Bernie Mac Show, The George Lopez Show, Everybody Hates Chris, and the reality television program Extreme Makeover are applauded for their portrayal and promotion of strong family values. 41 A press release in August of 2002 announced the PTC’s “first-ever ranking of the best and 41 Parents Television Council, “Best and Worst TV Shows of the Week,” http://www.parentstv.org/ PTC/publications/bw/welcome.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5VXcj9p3P). 116 worst original series on basic cable from a family-values perspective.” 42 And, in a December 2005 syndicated column on the “Family Television Awards,” PTC founder Brent Bozell framed his discussion of the inconsistencies in family friendly programming with the headline, “Who Defines ‘Family’ Values?” 43 Local activists that I interviewed agreed that media content deemed by the PTC to be family- unfriendly would also be seen as contrary to family values. Melissa Henson, PTC director of research, saw “family friendly TV” as a small part of the larger conservative push for family values, and said that the organization’s media decency campaigns had benefited from “a broader desire, on the part of the public, to restore family values in the United States.” 44 Employing the ideograph of “family values,” media decency crusaders like the Parents Television Council work to focus public attention on what they see as the decline of parents’ moral authority in contemporary American culture. As discussed in the last chapter, this claim relies on the rhetorical tactic of nostalgia, in order to create a sense of loss and a desire to return to a simpler, more decent time, when children still respected their parents. But the concept of “moral authority” is much more complex, and made up of several related sub-topics. One aspect, which is 42 Parents Television Council, “PTC’s First Annual Top Ten Best 7 Worst Cable Shows of the 2001/2002 TV Season,” August 1, 2002, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2002/ pr080102.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXctbTKB). 43 L. Brent Bozell, “Who Defines ‘Family’ Values?” Media Research Center, December 20, 2005, http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/entertainmentcolumn/2005/col20051220.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXdKRkID). 44 Melissa Henson (director of research, Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, October 2007; Debra Timberlake (chapter director, Bay Area Chapter of Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, November 2007. 117 explicit in most family values rhetoric, asserts the need to reestablish the moral authority of parents. Another aspect, which is generally implicit in the value claims made in the rhetoric of family values, asserts the moral authority of family values advocates, specifically those promoting a social or religious conservative worldview. I argue that the continued focus on the moral authority of parents in the media decency debate works to minimize or obscure the implicit claims to moral authority made by decency crusaders. In other words, it is parents who should be using their values to decide what is suitable for their children. The Parents Television Council is just trying to help parents make the most informed decisions possible. The PTC uses a wide range of rhetorical tactics to highlight the issue of moral authority. Most tactics negotiate the previously mentioned tension between parental authority, new media technologies, and unequal distributions of technological agency. The Parent Television Council’s conflicted relationship with new media technologies reflects this tension. Although the PTC acknowledges the positive contributions that these technologies make to family life – such as the increased availability of quality educational programming, the informational resources found on the world wide web, and the ability to speak face-to-face with relatives hundreds or thousands of miles away – they are quick to point out the negative impact that the same technologies – cable television, the Internet, and streaming video – have had on the level of decency in American popular culture. Reflecting and capitalizing on broader cultural fears, the PTC often presents new media as distributors of forbidden content and usurpers of parental authority. 118 At the beginning of 2006, for instance, Christopher Gildemeister devoted his PTC “Culture Watch” column to the proliferation of electronic media delivery systems. In it, he talks about how children can now access information and entertainment through cable television, satellite systems, satellite radio, streaming Internet video, “podcasting,” the iTunes store, DVDs, video games, and text messaging, to name just a few. “But the vastly accelerated pace of media consumption, and the large number of new ways to access it, should give parents pause,” says Gildemeister, because more media equals more decency problems. “Few of these new devices offer the possibility of parental lockout of harmful or objectionable programming. Thus, children may be increasingly exposed to images or music which parents find harmful or objectionable.” 45 More importantly, the increasing prevalence of portable, personal media devices means that parents will have less control and far less knowledge of what their children are consuming. The PTC’s cable choice campaign is based on a similar argument regarding the double-edged sword of increased access to media content. The organization refers to expanded basic cable as a “Pandora’ Box” for families, because, in order to gain access to the family friendly programming on Disney, Nickelodeon, 46 Discovery, or the History channel, parents also have to pay for and let into their 45 Christopher Gildemeister, “Culture Watch,” Parents Television Council, January 8, 2006, http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/culturewatch/2006/0108.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXdul9q7). 46 For an in-depth discussion of the Nickelodeon brand, and the channel’s marketing of itself as a challenge to parental or moral authority, see Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 119 homes channels like MTV, E!, and F/X. 47 Additionally, even if parents manage to block these channels or prevent their children from viewing offensive content on the television, they still have to contend with the Internet. Although the Parents Television Council focuses primarily on broadcast and cable television, PTC activists at both the national and local levels are worried about the television industry’s increasing use of the Internet to distribute content that would be considered indecent by either the network censors or the FCC. Several local activists cited a recent example of this “workaround.” On December 16, 2006, Saturday Night Live premiered the digital short “Dick in a Box,” featuring host Justin Timberlake and SNL cast member Andy Samberg. The network broadcast a censored version of the short, in which the word “dick” was bleeped 16 times, then released an uncensored version on the NBC website. 48 According to the PTC, NBC was using the Internet to bypass both decency law and the watchful eyes of parents, who generally devote more of their attention to what their children watch on television than what they might be watching on NBC.com or YouTube. Parents may not even be aware of the content that can be accessed online. The Parents Television Council capitalizes on this lack of parental knowledge, and the fear of being behind the times that accompanies it, particularly 47 Parents Television Council, “Cable Consumer Choice Campaign: Want the Disney Channel But Not MTV? Don’t Be Forced to Support Offensive Content. Choose Your Own Channels,” http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/cable/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5VXcGaPg6). 48 Parents Television Council, “PTC Criticizes NBC for Posting Uncensored ‘Saturday Night Live’ Skit on the Internet,” December 21, 2006, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2006/ 1221.asp (accessed February 10, 2006 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXe8vaHo). 120 when it comes to the Internet. Citing a 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation study of teenagers’ media habits that found a three-fold increase in social networking, Brent Bozell argues that parents should be anxious, because “they’re always behind the curve” when it comes to their children’s online lives. “What are they seeing, writing, and doing?” he asks rhetorically, then proceeds to detail how many teenagers have posted identifying information on their online profiles, how many have been solicited by a stranger, how many have considered meeting a stranger offline, and how many have actually met an online stranger face-to-face. He concludes by appealing to Romantic notions of the child, and calling for constant vigilance and surveillance: “Parents fear for their children because they are young and innocent, even oblivious to the danger and sickness of sex criminals in our midst. Every parent must know one thing. Don't leave your child alone with the Internet.” 49 Rhetoric highlighting the threat of new technologies – a familiar trope for decency crusaders – is present throughout the many discourses of the PTC. However, the organization’s strategic use of many of these media technologies makes the Parents Television Council an important example of how family values crusaders work to restore moral authority through technology. The PTC’s use and endorsement of digital video recording technology provides one illustration of this phenomenon. Although the PTC maintains a vast archive of tapes, they also depend on digital 49 L. Brent Bozell, “Watching Out For the Web,” Media Research Center, October 13, 2006, http:// www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/entertainmentcolumn/2006/col20061013.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXeOksZD). 121 video recorders to monitor and code programming across the broadcast and cable television grid. According to Melissa Henson, these records are essential to supporting the many indecency complaints that the organization files, because the FCC must have evidence of the indecent content to review, and stations have little incentive to maintain such recordings beyond the period of time specified by law. 50 The PTC’s extensive surveillance of television depends heavily on DVR technology, so the organization’s partnership with TiVo and endorsement of TiVo’s “KidZone” technology in March of 2006 seemed like the perfect pairing. TiVo had introduced KidZone as a solution to the difficulties parents face when searching for or trying to assess programming for their children, and the fact that many of these shows are either scheduled at odd hours or of indeterminate quality. TiVo KidZone offers a full menu of quality children’s programming, based on the viewing recommendations provided by the Parents’ Choice Foundation, Common Sense Media, and the Parents Television Council. TiVo sold the service as technology that would allow every family “to discover and program high-quality content that fits its needs and values.” 51 The PTC seconded this sentiment in their own press release, lauding this “new parental control device,” and adding that “parents will be able to manage the media consumption of their children in a way that reflect their values, 50 Melissa Henson, in discussion with the author, October 2007. 51 “TiVo Announces New Enhancement to TiVo KidZone: Parents Will Now Easily Be Able to Record Entire Menus of the Best in Children’s Education/Informational (E/I) Programming,” TiVo, March 14, 2006, http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/TIVO/174975773x0x56104/a5ba9c0e-f3e4- 4605-92fa-15dbf4919bdf/190232.pdf (accessed February 10, 2008, archived at http://www.web citation.org/5VXefnVv7). 122 not Hollywood’s values.” 52 New media technology may be part of the decency problem, but it can also be part of the solution, according to the Parents Television Council. Parental controls like TiVo’s KidZone can function as technologies of moral authority, exerting control over an overwhelming flow of information and images into the home. The Parents Television Council website provides links to additional technologies of moral authority that PTC members can purchase at a discounted price. 53 Sky Angel rooftop satellite service, for instance, is presented as an alternative to the general debauchery of cable television. The dish receives only conservative, family friendly television and radio channels (ranging from the Hallmark Channel to HGTV to Faith TV to the Fox News Network). 54 And a portion of the monthly Sky Angel subscription fee goes to support the continued efforts of the Parents Television Council. PTC members who are concerned about the prevalence of profanity, violence, and sex in popular movies can purchase a ClearPlay DVD player, which uses preset, downloadable content filters to censor objectionable material. After purchasing or renting a new DVD, parents just need to log on to ClearPlay’s website, download the filtering information for that particular 52 Parents Television Council, “PTC Lauds TiVo for New Parental Control Device,” March 2, 2006, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/release/2006/0302b.asp (accessed February 10, 2008, archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXelA3B2). 53 Parents Television Council, “Welcome to the PTC Online Store,” http://www.parentstv.org/store/ default.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXeq66fe). 54 “Sky Angel Channel Lineup,” Sky Angel: Christian Family Friendly TV and Radio, http://www.sky angel.com/Programming/Index.asp?Reference=ChannelLineup (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXf7iqHb). 123 film on to the USB drive provided, and plug the drive into their ClearPlay DVD player. 55 When the disc starts playing, the DVD player knows when to skip scenes or mute the audio, producing an edited version of the film more suitable for family viewing. The PTC website also advertises the parental control device “PowerCop,” an electronic lock which limits how long a child’s electronic device – such as a computer, television, or video game console – can be powered on to a preset amount of time. Although each technology tackles a different concern of contemporary media crusaders, all three shift a sense of technological agency, and the moral authority that accompanies such agency, back to parents. Parents who do not own a digital video recorder, cannot afford TiVo or Sky Angel, or feel that they are not technologically skilled enough to download DVD filters from the Internet, are not bereft of all hope. The Parents Television Council also relies on new media to arm parents with the information they need to limit their children’s television viewing manually. The PTC records every entertainment program aired on ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, i (formerly PAX), and CW, along with many popular cable programs, then analyzes each program according to the levels of profanity, violence, and/or sexual content it contains, creating a large archive of (in)decency data that can be presented to the general public, saved for future research studies, or used to lobby Congress for stricter media policy. Employing the “state-of- the-art computerized Entertainment Tracking System” mentioned above, they have 55 “About ClearPlay,” Clear Play Parental Control, http://www.clearplay.com/About.aspx (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXfFKayO). 124 been able to analyze the content of more than 125,000 hours of television. 56 But one of the most important products of all this research, according to activists, is the PTC’s Family Guide to TV. The Guide contains background information on dozens of programs and a summary of every episode that has been analyzed by the PTC. Each show is also evaluated with a traffic-light rating system (see Figure 3.1), with red lights next to the least family friendly programs and green lights indicating a “family friendly show promoting responsible themes and traditional values.” 57 Figure 3.1: Traffic-Light Rating System in PTC’s Family Guide to TV 56 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council is Working to Help You and Your Family Make Better Viewing Decisions…What’s on TV for Your Family Tonight?” http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/familyguide/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5VXZoGhwk). 57 Ibid 125 The Parents Television Council also uses new media to provide its supporters with a direct link to the FCC. The PTC has only twenty full-time employees working at its national headquarters, 58 yet it managed to generate almost a quarter million FCC complaints in 2003. This feat would not have been possible without the PTC’s heavy use of new media technologies such as “E-Alert” e-mails, the Family Guide to TV, and their “Action Center” e-portal to the FCC. These features work together to produce what appears to be mass public protest. Once you are on the PTC website, you are two clicks away from filing an official complaint with the FCC. Clicking on “File an FCC Complaint” takes you directly to the PTC Action Center, where you review the FCC’s criteria for obscenity or indecency in media, fill in the blanks of a preformatted complaint form, and then click the “sign and submit” button. 59 That’s all it takes to file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Looking at the overall message of these discourses and practices, it is clear that the Parents Television Council’s decency crusade depends on the traditional rhetorical tactic of creating distress or cultivating fear in the minds of one’s audience, then offering some means for alleviating these negative feelings. 60 When a PTC spokesperson makes a media appearance, it is usually to comment on current 58 Melissa Henson, in discussion with the author, October 2007. 59 Parents Television Council, “File an Official Indecency Complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Now,” https://www.parentstv.org/PTC/fcc/fcccomplaint.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5VXaJ324n). 60 For further information on the rhetorical use of fear appeals, see Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001). 126 social anxieties regarding children and media, or to identify new dangers for parents to worry about. The discourse of various PTC campaigns, publications, and research studies employs many fear appeals, amplifying cultural anxieties surrounding the increasing influence of media on children and decreasing moral authority of parents in the age of endless and immediately accessible information. Then the Parents Television Council can provide parents with the technologies of moral authority they need to reclaim control, while advocating for tighter regulation of the media. But tensions and contradictions lie beneath the PTC’s substantial investment in these technologies. Keenly aware of the fact that the rapid development of new media has a way of rendering current parental control technology obsolete, decency activists have to work hard at tracking new technological developments, staying ahead of the curve in order to maintain their credibility in the eyes of parents and supporters. Additionally, the Parents Television Council, and affiliated partners like TiVo and ClearPlay, must present new technologies of moral authority as easy to use, an important consideration for parents who often rely on the technical skills of their children to operate media technologies in the home. Anticipating this anxiety about technological agency, ClearPlay proclaims that its DVD technology is so easy that “anyone can do it (even if you can’t tell your mouse from your modem)!” 61 Yet a contradiction remains between the PTC’s ready endorsement of companies like ClearPlay and their perpetual distrust of any technologies of moral 61 “About ClearPlay,” Clear Play Parental Control. 127 authority supported by the television industry. They are particularly critical of the V- chip, in part because it relies on a ratings system developed and administered by the industry itself. 62 The PTC also claims that the ratings system – which is intended to identify objectionable content such as violence, coarse language, suggestive dialogue, or sex, and provide guidelines on the age-appropriateness of any given program – is too difficult for parents to interpret and the V-chip technology too complicated for parents to program. 63 An October 2007 PTC “E-alert” promoted a study that had documented how many adults were unable to use the parental controls standard on televisions, digital video recorders, gaming consoles, or mobile telephones. According to the PTC, “One-third of those tested couldn't set the parental controls on ANY of the devices!” 64 This claim is part of a larger PTC argument that the technologies proposed by the industry are bound to fail or are easily circumvented by children, primarily because the industry has no incentive to limit the number of people who consume its products. PTC activists also believe that the media industries promote technologies of moral authority in order to maintain their freedom to broadcast or 62 Melissa Henson, in discussion with the author, October 2007. 63 Parents Television Council, “The Ratings Sham II: TV Executives Still Hiding Behind a System that Doesn’t Work,” April 16, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/ratingsstudy/ RatingsShamII.pdf (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5VXfT01WL). 64 Parents Television Council, “Study Find Problems With Parental Controls,” Weekly Wrap, October 5, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/emailalerts/2007/wrapup_100507.htm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xjy3BT9H). 128 distribute anything, at anytime, in any market. 65 But the PTC’s broad criticism of these parental controls seems to contradict their ringing endorsement of the technologies of moral authority that they endorse and advertise. Moral Authority in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate In the media decency debate, parents have been instructed to take back the moral authority that has been usurped by the media, in order to regain their original status as teachers of traditional values and gatekeepers of adult knowledge. The same-sex marriage debate also highlights the facet of moral authority, but instead of focusing on parents retaking the moral authority that is rightfully theirs, activists argue over which parents have the right to be moral authorities, both within their own household and within American society. According to conservative family values advocates, gay and lesbian parents will morally corrupt children through the promotion of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle, the subsequent denial of the necessity of either a mother or a father, and the creation of a sexually-charged atmosphere in the home. LGBT activists argue that gay and lesbian parents are just as concerned with teaching strong values to their children as heterosexual parents are. Additionally, they contend, those who have had to overcome societal prejudice and enduring institutional obstacles in order to become parents will be likely to appreciate the importance of children, to literally value family, more than heterosexual parents, who have always had the privilege of procreating. 65 Melissa Henson, in discussion with the author, October 2007. 129 It is important to ask why children have played such a significant role in a debate over marriage, an institution that generally involves only adults. One reason may be found in the fact that the contemporary debate over same-sex marriage emerged after years of controversy over adoption by gay or lesbian parents, so activists on both sides had a rhetorical storehouse of stock arguments from which they could draw. Another reason can be found in the assumptions regarding the purpose of marriage held by those in favor of expanding marriage to include gays and lesbians and by those opposed to same-sex marriage. Beyond the traditional judicial arguments regarding rights and discrimination, many LGBT activists argue that, by denying the right to marriage, the United States has made families headed by gay or lesbian parents particularly vulnerable. Unpredictable life events, such as the death of one’s spouse or the dissolution of a relationship, may leave one partner with no biological or legal ties to his or her children. Social and religious conservatives, on the other hand, believe the rearing of children to be the key purpose of marriage, which leads them to disqualify gays and lesbians from marriage due to the physical impossibility of having children who are biologically related to both parents, and to assume that allowing same-sex marriage will produce a whole new generation of children with “two mommies” or “two daddies.” Anxieties surrounding moral authority are present in both discourses – conservative family values advocates argue that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to serve as the moral guardians of impressionable children, and fear that the legalization of same-sex marriage will lead to social acceptance of what they believe 130 is harmful to children; LGBT advocates argue that current legal restrictions impede or undermine moral authority in their own families, and that legalizing same-sex marriage will actually protect their children from the vicissitudes of the American legal system. Here, as in the decency debate, we see social conservatives warning the public of the dire consequences of relocating moral authority outside the boundaries of the traditional family, and concern over the negative influence that these Other authorities (media in the decency debate, gays and lesbians in the same-sex marriage debate) will have on children. This section will examine how the rhetoric of “family values” is deployed, contested, and revised in order to focus on the issue of moral authority. It will situate the contemporary contestation of moral authority in the context of past challenges to the moral of authority of stigmatized groups, paying particular attention to the renewed assault on poor or working-class black families, welfare recipients, single or working mothers, and gay or lesbian adoptive parents. It concludes by exploring how the rhetorical tactics used to question the moral authority of others have – and have not – changed in the contemporary debate over same-sex marriage. Misuses and Abuses of Moral Authority Alternative family structures have routinely been stigmatized on the basis of what conservative family values advocates perceive as a lack or misuse of moral authority in the home. Poor or working-class black families have been a perennial favorite when it comes to this type of criticism, particularly black mothers heading 131 their own households. Cultural sociologists and critical race theorists have documented how notions of racial inferiority are communicated through accusations of moral inferiority. 66 The continued political and social ramifications of the Moynihan Report discussed in chapter one provide us with one of the most prominent examples of how the concept of moral authority has been used to blame “black matriarchy” for problems afflicting the black community. 67 While the report acknowledges the authority that black women wield in these family structures through its use of the term “matriarch,” it also contends that these women lack the moral authority necessary to keep their children from turning into juvenile delinquents. A father must be present to keep children on the straight and narrow. This belief continues to exist in American society today. In the years since the report was issued, in both policy and popular discourse, the lower-income black single mother has come to stand in for both the crumbling black family and the problems facing the black community, reinforcing the middle-class, white, and patriarchal aspects of the “traditional family.” As critical sociologist Herman Gray argues, “the black body has more often than not functioned symbolically to signal the erosion of family, the deleterious consequences of single-parent households, and 66 Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2004); and Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 67 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, Office of Public Policy Planning and Research of the Department of Labor, 1965). 132 the purported threat to a patriarchal moral order.” 68 This image has also been used to attribute persistent economic inequalities between whites and blacks to the latter’s supposed inability to adhere to the norms of the patriarchal, nuclear family model. 69 The highly publicized remarks of Bill Cosby in 2004 provide us with a concrete example of how this focus on moral authority functions as a means of differentiating “good parents” from “bad parents.” In his speech to the NAACP in May of 2004, Bill Cosby prefaced his remarks with the following statement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on.” 70 Making an unambiguous distinction between inner city “street values” and the “decent values,” of the black middle-class, 71 Cosby attributed the social problems affecting many black communities to what he perceived as the impoverished values of lower-class blacks. Almost immediately after delivering the speech, Cosby was criticized for being unsympathetic toward the structural difficulties faced by lower-class black Americans. “I am in as much pain as many, many people about these people,” he responded, managing to express both empathy and distance in the same statement. But “the 50 percent dropout rate, the seeming 68 Gray, Cultural Moves, 24. 69 Ferguson, Aberrations in Black. 70 Bill Cosby, “Address at the NAACP’s commemoration of the 50 th of Brown v. Board of Education,” American Rhetoric, May 17, 2004, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/billcosby poundcakespeech.htm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Xjykpnif). 71 Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999). 133 acceptance of having children and not making the father responsible and calling him in on it,” Cosby continued. “It’s easy to pass these things on like some kind of epidemic.'” 72 Again we see the belief that entrusting “bad parents” with moral authority over children results in “bad influence” that only worsens problems, and, in Cosby’s eyes, the image of the black community. While the Moynihan Report’s focus on the black family’s structure did not ignore structural inequalities and discrimination, Moynihan’s research has been continually used to push for welfare reforms that limit the amount of assistance given to those facing such problems today. 73 It is no surprise, then, that welfare recipients are so often viewed as “bad mothers,” as in the image of the welfare queen, who continues to have more children just to increase the amount of her monthly check. 74 The general public’s disregard for the moral authority of welfare mothers is reflected in high levels of support for the idea of the government exerting its own moral authority on these women – through welfare reform. 75 By incentivizing marriage, welfare reformists hope to significantly lessen dependence on government aid, and to 72 Felicia R. Lee, “Cosby Defends His Remarks About Poor Black’s Values,” The New York Times, May 22, 2004, B7. 73 See Robert Rector, “Welfare Reform and the Healthy Marriage Initiative,” February 10, 2005, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/tst021005a.cfm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XjJb2GJm). 74 Robert Asen, Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2002); Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 75 Hays, Flat Broke with Children. 134 restore moral authority to poor and working-class households through the addition of a stable father figure. The women who depend on this system are quite cognizant of this perceived lack of moral authority, and must struggle to articulate their right to assistance. In her ethnographic study of single mothers in the U.S. welfare system, cultural sociologist Sharon Hays documents one way that welfare recipients cope with their diminished place in the larger American culture of parenting. 76 Nadia, a 23-year-old single mother of four, possessed a clear understanding of her place. According to Hays, “Nadia was keenly aware that there is a larger culture out there, one in which she has not been included. And she also knew quite well that she was a failure by the standards of that culture.” 77 But, at the same time, Nadia was able to differentiate herself from other welfare mothers by citing her steadfast devotion to her kids, framed in the traditional valuation of stay-at-home moms: “I work,” she said, “the work I do is taking care of my kids.” 78 Obviously, Nadia’s family structure does not conform to the conservative ideal: she has had four children out of wedlock, with multiple fathers, none of which take an active parenting – or even supporting – role. But she was able to make a small claim to social respect, through what Hays 76 Hays, Flat Broke with Children. 77 Ibid, 186. 78 Ibid, 186-187. 135 describes as “the mainstream cultural valuation of childrearing, and an older valorization of ‘traditional’ stay-at-home motherhood” in the United States. 79 This rhetorical move references another cultural struggle over issues of moral authority, this time between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. In what has been colloquially termed the “Mommy Wars,” child-rearing experts, social critics, and average citizens have debated the merits and drawbacks of both types of parenting. 80 Those who advocate the stay-at-home approach cite concerns over ceding one’s moral authority to nannies, baby-sitters, or daycare providers, fearing that children may have difficulty knowing who they should obey, or may pick up bad habits or bad values outside of the home. These concerns are strikingly similar to the fears of lost moral authority and bad influence in the media decency debate, with the paid caregiver standing in for the television or larger media culture. The general public malaise with the idea of the television-as-babysitter reflects the same overlap between the two debates. The 1992 controversy over Vice President Dan Quayle’s condemnation of the television character Murphy Brown also illustrates how cultural anxieties over moral authority can traffic between debates over parenting and debates over the media. In the 1991-1992 season of Murphy Brown, the title character became pregnant and 79 Hays, Flat Broke with Children, 191. 80 Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Miriam Peskowitz, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005); Leslie Morgan Steiner, Mommy Wars: Stay-At-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (New York: Random House, 2007). 136 opted to raise the baby as a single (and working) mother. During a speech on the campaign trail in May of 1992, Quayle criticized the show for glamorizing single parenthood. Attributing the recent riots in Los Angeles to a general decline of family values in American culture, he lamented how it “doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” 81 The controversy generated by these comments centered on the issue of whether or not single parenthood should be viewed as contrary to family values, indicating that most people agreed with the Vice President’s implicit claim that the television program itself was serving as a moral authority by passing its values on to American viewers. The focus on family values in the 1990s also led to renewed debate over the adoption of children by gays and lesbians. Although the practice of building same- sex families through adoption predated Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign, the arguments generated by Bryant and other conservative family values advocates, and the resulting legal restrictions on gay and lesbian adoption, persist to the present day. In 1977, Bryant, an American singer and spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice, launched a campaign to repeal the Miami-Dade county ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Arguing that “homosexuals 81 Andrew Rosenthal, “After the Riots; Quayle Says Riots Sprang From Lack of Family Values,” New York Times, May 20, 1992, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D6143CF933 A15756C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 (accessed February 1, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xj94IEg2). 137 cannot reproduce so they must recruit,” Bryant aimed to convince the county that children needed legal protection from gay men and lesbians. 82 The campaign was successful – the ban on discrimination was overturned and the Florida legislature eventually passed a state statute forbidding the adoption of children by gays and lesbians. 83 While contemporary arguments against gay and lesbian adoption have moved beyond the fear of a cult-like group of homosexuals recruiting innocent young children to a deviant lifestyle, the belief in negative influence remains the same, and relates back to the question of who gets to be a moral authority for our nation’s children. According to opponents of gay and lesbian adoption, granting the moral authority of parenthood to gay or lesbian individuals will threaten children’s physical and mental well-being, produce gender-confusion, and lead to the eventual acceptance of non-heterosexual lifestyles, which, in these advocates’ eyes, is the ultimate abuse of moral authority. We see the same cultural anxieties expressed in the rhetoric of the current debate over same-sex marriage. Marriage, Moral Authority, and Child Protectionism In “DOMA Won’t Do It: Why the Constitution Must be Amended to Save Marriage,” a 2004 Family Research Council brochure, authors Gerard V. Bradley and William L. Saunders define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman 82 Neil Schlager, St. James Press Gay & Lesbian Almanac (Detroit: St. James Press, 1998), 282. 83 The campaign was successful – the ban on discrimination was overturned and the Florida legislature eventually passed a state statue forbidding the adoption of children by gays and lesbians. 138 that is (a) monogamous; (b) sexually exclusive; (c) the morally legitimate context for raising children; and (d) permanent.” 84 This claim contains or implies most of the major arguments marshaled against same-sex marriage by conservative family values advocates – that expanding the definition of marriage to include gays and lesbians will push us down the slippery slope to polygamy, that gay and lesbian individuals are too promiscuous to respect the sanctity of marriage, that the gay or lesbian- headed household is a dangerous place for children, and that gay or lesbian relationships lack the permanence associated with heterosexual unions. 85 According to this perspective, gay and lesbian family structures are not morally legitimate contexts for raising children, and allowing gays and lesbians to serve as moral authorities to children – in any capacity, from parenting to scout leadership 86 – will result in irrevocable sexual, psychological, or social harm. The Family Research Council and Focus on the Family provide several online resources linking male homosexuality to pedophilia or the sexual abuse of children. 87 And, conservative 84 Gerard V. Bradley and William L. Saunders, “DOMA Won’t Do It: Why The Constitution Must Be Amended to Save Marriage,” Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=BC04D03 (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk4C2Cdq). 85 For a rebuttal, see Kath Weston, “Forever is a Long Time: Romancing the Real in Gay Kinship Ideologies,” in Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (New York: Routledge, 1998), 57-82. 86 John Cloud, “Can a Scout be Gay?” Time, May 1, 2000, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,996776,00.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5YwlzZPMV). 87 Jodi Carlson, “Overcoming Homosexuality: Understanding the Roots of Male Homosexuality,” Focus on the Family, http://www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/homosexuality/overcoming/A000001538.cfm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk78IzXB); Timothy J. Dailey, “Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse,” Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/get/ is02e3.cfm (archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk7YvbBK). 139 activists argue, even if children are not abused, they are still exposed to issues of adult sexuality that they may not be mature enough to deal with. During our interview, Jeff Laszloffy, president and founder of the Montana Family Foundation, assured me that many of the gay men he has met agree that same-sex households are simply “too sexually charged” for young children. 88 In most of the conservative discourse on moral authority and same-sex families, gay and lesbian parents are attributed much more influence over children’s feelings and behaviors than heterosexual parents. Similar to fears surrounding the mimicry of sexual acts or violence seen in the media, conservative family values advocates point to studies indicating that “children raised by homosexuals are significantly more likely to develop a homosexual orientation themselves.” 89 Laszloffy admitted that these types of claims, which rely on a basic agreement regarding the undesirability of a homosexual orientation in children, work best to rally religious conservatives to action. 90 When advancing arguments regarding harm to children in the context of a broader, more secular culture, religious conservatives tend to rely on social scientific studies that “prove” that children who are raised in 88 Jeff Laszloffy (President, Montana Family Association), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 89 Focus on the Family, “Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ and Civil Unions,” http://www.family.org/socialissues/ A000000464.cfm (accessed February 10, 2008 & archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk5Ezl8). It should be noted that Focus on the Family cites a 2001 study by Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz (“(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?” American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 159-183) to support this claim. Stacey subsequently criticized the conservative advocacy group for what she saw as a misrepresentation of the study results. 90 Jeff Laszloffy, in discussion with the author, July 2007. 140 same-sex families are significantly more likely to suffer from psychological or behavioral problems, and to have trouble with socialization. The question of whether or not same-sex families are psychologically harmful to children is a key point of contention in the current debate over same-sex marriage, primarily because not much longitudinal data exists on the long-term effects of same-sex family structures. 91 But this does not stop either side from citing social scientific studies to “prove” or “disprove” any particular point, and from taking issue with the research cited by the other side. Glenn T. Stanton, director of social research and cultural affairs and senior analyst for marriage and sexuality at Focus on the Family, takes issue with what he feels are unqualified claims made by proponents of same-sex marriage and families. In his article, “Are Same-Sex Families Good for Children?” he disputes his opponents’ claims that children with gay or lesbian parents fare just as well as the children of heterosexual parents in emotional, cognitive, and sexual functioning, and that social scientific studies have found no developmental differences between children raised by heterosexual parents and children raised by gay or lesbian parents. As Stanton reminds his readers, the science on the “same-sex family experiment” is literally in its infancy, meaning we lack “a reliable body of research” on long-term developmental effects. And, even if 91 See American Psychological Association, “Lesbian & Gay Parenting: Empirical Studies Specifically Related to Lesbian & Gay Parents & Their Children,” http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/ publications/lgpstspec.html (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Xk5hOaHK). 141 the question of harm is still up in the air, Stanton asks, is it ethical “to turn thousands of children into human guinea pigs?” 92 The metaphor of “experimentation” is a recurrent trope in the discourse of Focus on the Family and other social conservatives. This rhetorical tactic helps activists link contemporary anxieties over entrusting gay or lesbian parents with moral authority to past changes in family structure or family law. In fact, a collection of “lines and arguments” that Focus on the Family urges its supporters to use in public debates over same-sex marriage draws a direct analogy between the documented impact of divorce or single parenthood on children and the potential harms that will result from raising children in same-sex families: All of the family experimentation over the past 30 years – no fault divorce, the sexual revolution, cohabitation, fatherlessness – have all been documented failures, harming adults and children in far deeper ways, for longer periods of time, than anyone ever imagined. Why do we think that this radical experiment will somehow bring good things? All we have is (opponent’s name’s) promise that everything will work out fine. Well, the advocates of each of these other experiments assured us the same thing. 93 According to this position, the same-sex family experiment must be stopped before a new generation of children is emotionally scarred by the selfish choices of adults. Laszloffy also framed same-sex marriage and families in terms of the negative impact that adult desires may have on the children involved. “To take an institution 92 Glenn T. Stanton, “Are Same-Sex Families Good For Children?” Focus on the Family, http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000000456.cfm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk5ovIsQ). 93 Glenn T. Stanton, “Defending Marriage: Answering the Tough Questions,” Focus on the Family, http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000000627.cfm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk5zKLbb). 142 that has proven itself as far as a stable mechanism for raising kids, and to go off into this wild experiment that we know nothing about,” he said, echoing the metaphors of family experimentation and fear of the unknown, “I think it’s dangerous. I think it’s reckless.” 94 Here again the child is discursively constructed as a vulnerable innocent, who has been subjected to dangerous conditions with no means of escape, much in the same way lab animals are constructed in animal rights discourse. 95 In both cases, the discursive figure’s inability to consent serves to garner public support and justify action taken on behalf of those who lack the agency to act for themselves. Here, conservative family values activists are asking the public to protect children from the deficiencies, or even dangers, of same-sex family structures. The focus on moral authority in conservative “family values” is not limited to the above concerns regarding the influence of gay and lesbian parents on their children. Conservatives also feel that the traditional family is losing its moral authority in contemporary American society, and that the legalization of same-sex marriage would only accelerate this trend. In “11 Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage,” Focus on the Family founder James Dobson uses census data from countries that have already legalized same-sex marriage to argue that expanding the 94 Jeff Laszloffy, in discussion with the author, July 2007. 95 Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy Over Fur,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 80.3 (1994): 249- 276; Carl Wellman, “Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics,” in The Proliferation of Rights: Moral Progress or Empty Rhetoric? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 97-130. 143 institution of marriage will only weaken it. 96 Dobson claims that legalizing same-sex marriage has resulted in higher rates of cohabitation, polygamy, and single parenthood, among both heterosexuals and homosexuals. 97 To these family values advocates, it matters little whether the legalization of same-sex marriage led to the decline of the traditional family structure, or whether increasing social acceptance of alternative family structures resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage. Both scenarios are equally problematic, for the latter means that same-sex families are gaining the moral authority that comes with social legitimation. The increasing social legitimacy of same-sex families is a major concern for groups like Focus on the Family or Family Research Council, and they do not shy away from talking about the worst-case scenarios: “Schools will be forced to teach that the homosexual family is normal,” warns Stanton, “Churches will be legally pressured to perform same-sex ceremonies.” 98 But recurring public controversies over the introduction of books or curricula designed to increase awareness of or promote tolerance toward same-sex family structures, such as Heather Has Two Mommies or And Tango Makes Three, demonstrate that we have yet to arrive at the level of social legitimacy for same-sex couples and families that Stanton and other 96 James C. Dobson, “Eleven Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage,” Focus on the Family, http:// www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/homosexuality/A000004753.cfm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YwmgCBPq). 97 Ibid. 98 Glenn T. Stanton, “Defending Marriage: Answering the Tough Questions.” 144 conservatives fear. 99 Gay and lesbian parents continue to encounter social and institutional obstacles that question their moral authority as parents, or strip them of parental authority entirely. When the issue of children comes up in the same-sex marriage debate, LGBT activists employ two major rhetorical tactics: documenting their sufficiency as moral authorities (their fitness as parents) through social science, professional opinion, narratives, and images; and presenting the laws and institutional policies that question their moral authority as threats to the security of their families and the happiness of their children. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a national LGBT advocacy organization, provides its supporters with an online archive of relevant social science research on same-sex parenting, 100 and external links to organizations that support the “prevailing professional opinion” that “a parent’s sexual orientation has nothing to do with his or her ability to be a good parent.” 101 Scientific evidence and expert opinion are personalized through family portraits (see Figure 3.2) and stories or testimonials of gay or lesbian parents that emphasize how same-sex families are just like traditional families. 99 Leslea Newman and Diane Souza, Heather Has Two Mommies, 10 th anniversary edition (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 2000); Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, And Tango Makes Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). 100 Human Rights Campaign, “Social Science Research,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/parenting/1601. htm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xk6OksIS). 101 Human Rights Campaign, “Professional Organizations on GLBT Parenting,” http://www.hrc.org/ issues/parenting/professional-opinion.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5Xk6VIks8). 145 Figure 3.2: Human Rights Campaign’s “Family Portrait” These stories also present gay and lesbian parents with the opportunity to articulate how bans on same-sex marriage actually harm the children they are ostensibly trying to protect. Take this excerpt from the “The Deutsch Williams Family Story,” published by the Human Rights Campaign as part of a larger collection of what the HRC refers to as “Your Stories”: These are enormous additional worries and concerns that the average married family never has to consider. We should not have to either. The only difference between our relationship and family is that we are two women. The commitment, love, dedication to each other and our children is equal to those people with a civil marriage license. We deserve the same rights and protections that these married couples receive – our children deserve it. 102 Christine Kaufmann, director of the Montana Human Rights Network (a state-level organization which is not affiliated with the Human Rights Campaign), finds these narratives to be more effective at legitimating gay and lesbian parenting than 102 Human Rights Campaign, “Parenting: Your Stories,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/parenting/ parenting_your_story.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 & archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Xk6eiwek). 146 scientific studies, because the methodology or conclusions of any given study are easier to dispute than the lived experiences of same-sex families. 103 Detailing the time, effort, and thousands of dollars spent patching together the legal protections that heterosexual partners receive with their civil marriage license is another common rhetorical technique employed by LGBT activists. When asked about the legal disadvantages that same-sex couples face, Vikki Pickart, an activist involved with the Montana Pride Network, described her own family’s attempt to patch together the legal privileges and rights automatically afforded to married heterosexual couples. These privileges and protections range from the ability to take the name of your spouse to the ability to make important medical decisions in the event of an emergency. “When you get married in Montana, you automatically get a free name change,” Pickart pointed out. “It cost me $600 to get my name changed.” 104 It also took Pickart and her partner a great deal of time and money to establish the power of attorney, custody rights, and rights of survivorship that are automatically granted to heterosexual couples married under the law. In an interview she gave to the Billings Gazette in June of 2007, Pickart put the legal and economic discrimination she had experienced in succinct terms: “We had to fight for every little privilege that a straight couple would just be granted with a $50 marriage 103 Christine Kaufmann (director, Montana Human Rights Network), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 104 Vikki Pickart (community organizer, Montana Pride Network), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 147 license.” 105 According to the Human Rights Campaign, there are 1,138 benefits, rights, and protections provided by federal law to married couples, many of which impact the relationship between a parent and his or her children. 106 Without the legal protections afforded by marriage, it is much more difficult for the legal system to recognize the moral authority of a non-biological parent. In the event of divorce or spousal death, one partner may find himself or herself without any legal right to custody or visitation of the children that he or she has helped to raise. Conclusion This chapter has argued that moral authority plays a significant, and similar, role in both the same-sex marriage and the media decency debate. In both sites of cultural contestation, the child – presumed to be innocent and in need of protection – serves as a warrant for the regulation of media content and parenting. The chapter has explored how the rhetoric of child protectionism that accompanies this concern over moral authority has been used in the media decency debate to pass legislation, justify court decisions, and sell media control technologies to anxious parents. The chapter considered the role that social scientific research plays in debates over moral 105 Donna Healy, “Couple Finds Challenges, Joys in Relationship,” Billings Gazette, June 9, 2007, http://billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/06/09/features/life/20-challengejoy.txt (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5YyCuDEs4). 106 Human Rights Campaign, “An Overview of Federal Rights and Protections Granted to Married Couples,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/5585.htm (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5Xk6qAXaE). 148 authority, specifically the way that scientific authority is used to justify assertions of what is and is not good for children. This scientific authority has also been used to make a case for traditional gender roles, a rhetorical strategy that will be explored in the next chapter. In addition to their belief in the superior moral authority of heterosexual parents, proponents of traditional marriage believe that mothers and fathers possess unique and complimentary types of moral authority – “mother love” and “father love” – that are both required for the optimal psychological development of children, making the traditional family structure essential for raising children. This rhetorical move seeks to disqualify, from the start, any family structures that fail to provide children with both a mother and a father, specifically gay and lesbian households. Thus, as the next chapter will discuss, gender has come to play a surprisingly significant role in cultural debates over issues of sexuality. 149 Chapter 4: Focus on Gender It is safe to say that gender has been, and will continue to be, a major focus of family values rhetoric in many sites of cultural politics. One need look no further than the so-called “Mommy Wars” or the “crisis of masculinity” to see how our beliefs and anxieties about gender lend persuasive power to the rhetoric of family values. The criticism of working mothers by advocates of stay-at-home motherhood often combines essentialist and normative understandings of gender – that women are “naturally” nurturing and therefore “designed” to take care of children, or that a “good” woman will always choose her children over her career – with statements of what is or is not best for the welfare of children. 1 Recurring debates over what social commentators have dubbed the “crisis of masculinity” have included similar links between gender, child development, and juvenile delinquency. 2 If asked, most people would agree that gender plays a key role in these discourses of family values. But this chapter makes a larger claim about gender and “family values,” one that extends beyond the boundaries of any particular debate. Here I will argue that gender always plays a significant role in family values rhetoric, even in cultural 1 Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, 2004); Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds., “Bad’ Mothers” The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Miriam Peskowitz, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005). 2 Tim Edwards, “‘Crisis, What Crisis?’: Sex Roles Revisited,” in Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006), 7-24; Susan Fauldi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1999); Linda McDowell, Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class Youth (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 150 debates that do not seem to be explicitly about gender. This conceptualization has both theoretical and pragmatic consequences for those who study and participate in cultural politics. It reaffirms the value of viewing these debates through the lens of feminist theory, and it suggests that activists must grapple with deeper issues in their own advocacy. The fact that gender is significant, but not explicit, in these debates is what makes things so complicated. After all, on the surface, the topics of same-sex marriage and media decency seem to have little to do with gender. Both debates are mostly about sexuality – sexual orientation in the same-sex marriage debate and sexual content in the media decency debate – and its impact on children. But, after examining the discourse, we see that these debates are also very much about gender. One of the most significant shifts in the rhetoric of family values in the same- sex marriage debate, for example, has been the renewed focus on traditional gender roles. Writing on the issue of same-sex marriage in August of 2003, Focus on the Family senior analyst Glenn T. Stanton faulted gay and lesbian parents for depriving children of either a mother or a father. According to Stanton: If Heather is being raised by two mommies and Brandon is being raised by Daddy and his new husband-roommate, Heather and Brandon might have two adults in their lives, but they are being deprived of the benefits found in the unique influences found in a mother and father’s differing parenting styles. Much of the value mothers and fathers bring to their children is due to the fact that mothers and fathers are different. And by cooperating together and complementing each other in their differences, they provide these good things that same-sex caregivers cannot. 3 3 Glenn T. Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1,” Focus on the Family, August 23, 2003, http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000001142.cfm (accessed February 29, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5ViCmuiVG). 151 He goes on to explain how mothers and fathers play differently, communicate differently, and just parent differently. “Children need mom’s softness as well as dad’s roughhousing,” he argues, in order to grow up tough and sensitive, but not too tough or too sensitive. 4 As we saw in the previous chapter, claims regarding what is and is not conducive to healthy child development have been a recurring elements of family values rhetoric. Stanton and other conservative family values advocates have used social scientific evidence and expert testimony to “prove” that gay and lesbian parents are unfit moral authorities for children. But statements about essential (and essentialized) differences between male and female parents are more than just a critique of non-traditional families or a defense of traditional marriage; they also function as an argument for traditional gender roles. Gender as Rhetorical Strategy This shift in family values discourse is partly rhetorical in nature. It reflects a strategic response to the cooptation of conservative arguments – specifically the importance of having two married parents in the household – by LGBT activists pushing for marriage equality. By shifting the focus of family values rhetoric from the importance of two-parent families to the necessity of having both “mother-love” and “father-love” in a child’s life, 5 conservative advocates of traditional marriage seek to disqualify same-sex families from the start. This focus on gender roles also 4 Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1.” 5 Ibid. 152 allows conservative activists to draw from a broad array of their previous arguments against divorce and nontraditional family structures, particularly single-parent households. Because decency activists are facing a different set of rhetorical circumstances, an explicit focus on gender is far more pronounced in the same-sex marriage debate. But this does not mean that gender is absent from the media decency debate; it just takes a normative rather than essentialist form. Here, the characters that populate “family friendly” programming, 6 especially those deemed by decency crusaders to be positive role models for young viewers, tend not to stray too far outside of traditional gender norms. Looking closely at the characters and programs that are singled out as offensive or harmful to children, we see a push to differentiate between good and bad performances of gender. Hypersexualized female characters are criticized for presenting a negative image of femininity to young girls, while decency crusaders worry that repeated exposure to televised violence will trigger latent aggression in young boys. Here, as in the rest of culture, gender norms are reflected in then reinforced by what gets praised and what gets blamed. The focus on gender reveals key ideological underpinnings of the rhetoric of family values, indicating that there is more at stake here than just marriage or media content. This discourse reflects conservative activists’ deeper anxieties over the loss of traditional gender roles, and the general stability (or instability, as the case may 6 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council is Working to Help You and Your Family Make Better Viewing Decisions…What’s on TV for Your Family Tonight?” http://www. parentstv.org/PTC/familyguide/main.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5VXZoGhwk). 153 be) of gender identity in contemporary society. As Richard Thompson Ford, a legal scholar and expert in civil rights law, points out, even though public opinion polls show increasing popular support for the idea of equal legal rights for gays and lesbians, a majority of Americans still oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. “A lot of the resistance is less about sexual orientation than about sex difference. In other words, it’s not about the difference between gay and straight; it’s about the difference between male and female,” Thompson argues. 7 Weddings and marriage remain one of the few institutional sites where individuals embrace sex-specific statuses (of husband and wife) and celebrate gendered traditions. He notes that when San Francisco temporarily legalized same-sex marriage in February of 2004, the city changed the blanks on its marriage certificate form from “bride” and “groom” to “first applicant” and “second applicant.” 8 It seems that, in addition to threatening the institutionalization of heterosexuality, same-sex marriage also disrupts the gendering of the institution of marriage. When we view these debates from a wider lens, we can see how the many cultural crusades undertaken by conservative family values advocates, from efforts to ban same-sex marriage to media decency campaigns, also serve a deeper ideological purpose – to regulate practices of gender and sexuality, and to defend traditional gender roles in the face of what these advocates perceive as the increasing instability 7 Richard Thompson Ford, “Hate and Marriage: Same-Sex Marriage Setbacks May Not Be All Bad News for Gay Rights,” Slate, July 12, 2006, http://www.slate.com/id/2145620/ (accessed February 29, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Vu2OLxbI). 8 Ibid. 154 of gender identity. This chapter looks at how gender and sexuality are articulated through one another in the debates over same-sex marriage and media decency. It starts with a discussion of the essentialism that informs traditional gender roles, and then analyzes how essentialism functions as a rhetorical strategy in the same-sex marriage debate. The second part of the chapter will examine the normalization of gendered practice in the media decency debate. Starting with the premise that gender norms are established and then reinforced through discourses of praise and blame, it documents how the many pieces of cultural criticism constructed and disseminated by decency crusaders rely on a distinction between “good” and “bad” performances of femininity and masculinity. It concludes by taking a step back from the specific sites of the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, in order to discuss the deeper anxieties about gender identity embedded within the rhetoric of family values, and to consider how these fears relate to campaigns against sexuality. Essentialism in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate The distinction between “mother-love” and “father-love” advanced by family values advocates relies on an essentialized conception of femininity and masculinity as innate, fixed qualities that remain constant over time, a common understanding of gender that I will refer to as “gender conservatism” from this point forward. 9 They 9 Before proceeding further, it is important to note that “gender conservatism” is not the same as political or ideological conservatism, even though social and religious conservatives tend to embrace essentialist understandings of gender. People across the political and ideological spectrum understand gender in essentialist terms. The pervasiveness of gender conservatism in contemporary culture may help to explain why conservative family values activists focus so heavily on gender. 155 argue that men and women are fundamentally different by design, both anatomically and psychologically, and that these differences are intended to be complementary. 10 In this view, biological sex is synonymous with gender; females possess feminine traits and males possess masculine traits. Women are seen as naturally docile, polite, social, and reliable, while men are seen as naturally aggressive, frank, independent, and unpredictable. 11 When this view of gender is mapped onto family structures and parenting, women are understood to be warmer, more nurturing, and more mindful of protecting their children from the dangers beyond the home, while men are more likely to roughhouse, challenge, and push their children to engage with the perils and possibilities of the outside world. Or, as Stanton puts it, “Fathers help children prepare for the reality and harshness of the real world, and mothers help protect against it.” 12 In this perspective, femininity and masculinity balance each other out in the context of the household and in the practice of childrearing. Although conservative family values advocates argue that it is important for both mothers and fathers to participate in the raising of children, their focus on the differences between women and men, and their essentialized understanding of these 10 The conservative soundbite on same-sex marriage, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” communicates the same belief – that woman was, at the moment of her creation, designed for man, and intended to be his mate and companion (Genesis 2). 11 See the Bem Sex-Role Inventory for a list of traits traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity: Sandra R. Bem, “The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 42 (1974): 155-162. 12 Glenn T. Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 2,” Focus on the Family, August 23, 2003, http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000000635.cfm (accessed February 29, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5WFpBphUE). 156 differences, tends to support a division of labor based on traditional gender roles. 13 According to this logic, because women are – by their very nature – more nurturing and concerned about others, they are better suited to taking care of children and maintaining a household. And because men are – by their very different nature – independent and competitive, they are better suited to being the family’s sole financial provider. The conservative family values perspective does not generally recognize the possibility that these traits, skills, or “natural” talents may be the result, rather than the cause, of the difference in opportunities historically afforded to men and women. 14 It also fails to consider the power relationships that helped to establish and then maintain a patriarchal system of kinship, one that saw a woman’s most rightful place as in the home. 15 Instead, gender conservatism sees mothers’ distrust of the outside world as evidence of women’s natural affinity for, and suitability to, the private sphere, while fathers’ purported desire to send children out into the world is seen as a reflection of men’s natural affinity for, and suitability to, the public sphere. Thus, the male breadwinner and female homemaker of the traditional nuclear 13 For a foundational piece on the gendered division of labor, see Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Boston: Kluwer, 1983), 283-310. 14 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 15 Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19-26; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157-210. 157 family, a historically and culturally specific kinship structure, are rendered natural and universal through an essentialized understanding of gender. Gender essentialism also plays a prominent role in conservative family values activists’ defense of traditional marriage. Further examination of Glenn T. Stanton’s treatise on “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love” reveals a substantial investment in what conservative activists see as “natural” and necessary differences between mothers and fathers. “Men and women are different,” he states before going on to provide a list of ostensibly obvious examples: “They eat differently. They dress differently. They smell different. They groom themselves differently. They cope with life differently. Fathers do ‘man things’ and women do ‘lady things.’” 16 There may be some universal human traits that men and women hold in common, but, according to Stanton, their differences are far more important when it comes to raising children. He uses social science studies and quotes from other traditional family advocates to document how “mothering” and “fathering” contribute to different areas of child development: mothers simplify their language to facilitate early communication while fathers build linguistic skills by speaking in an adult manner, mothers tend to children’s basic needs while fathers engage children in play, mothers teach children to be cautious while fathers teach children to push their limits. 17 16 Glenn T. Stanton. “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 2.” 17 Glenn T. Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1.” 158 In each of the subsequent sections of his two-part series, Stanton sets up the same dialectic between mothers and fathers, a tension that is clearly derived from an essentialist understanding of men, women, and gender. Differences in parenting style are attributed to innate and fixed gender differences. Women coddle their children because they are inherently nurturing; men push their children because they are, by nature, more competitive and aggressive. Women seek to shield their children from the dangers outside of the home; men seek to propel them out into the world.” 18 Although Stanton refrains from explicitly stating that a woman’s place is in the home, he repeatedly locates his ideal mother in the private sphere, while his ideal father inhabits the public sphere of the “real world.” He uses this public/private distinction – and the essentialized gender differences that inform it – to argue that fathers are necessary for children to make the transition from financial dependence to independence from their parents: “This is because fathers, more than mothers, are likely to have the kinds of diverse community connections needed to help young adults get their first jobs” outside of the home; they are also more “likely [to] have the motivation to make sure their children make these connections.” 19 Stanton provides no explanation for why mothers are less motivated to help their children make career connections, but the rest of the article clearly suggests that women are, by their very nature, adverse to the outside world. 18 Glenn T. Stanton. “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 2.” 19 Ibid. 159 Perhaps mindful of the fact that he could be accused of valuing the parenting contributions of fathers over mothers, Stanton is careful to emphasize what he sees as the complementary relationship between mothering and fathering. When it comes to parenting, he argues, men need women just as much as women need men, because each gender tempers the other’s extremes. Conservative activists see the tension between femininity and masculinity as, for lack of a better word, essential to healthy child development. The removal of either parent is thus detrimental to children: Either of these parenting styles by themselves can be unhealthy. One can tend toward encouraging risk without consideration of consequences. The other tends to avoid risk, which can fail to build independence, confidence and progress. Joined together, they keep each other in balance and help children remain safe while expanding their experiences and confidence. 20 Because this text is framed as a collection of arguments against same-sex marriage and parenting, the implication is clear – “two daddy” (gay) households are dangerous for children because they encourage risk without consideration of consequences, 21 while “two mommy” (lesbian) households are harmful because they fail to cultivate independence and confidence in children. In the heterosexual nuclear family, fathers and mothers balance out each other’s “natural” tendencies. In the gay or lesbian family, according to this logic, having a same-sex partner only amplifies these tendencies. As I mentioned in chapter three, Montana Family Foundation President Jeff Laszloffy argues that households headed by gay men are particularly dangerous 20 Glenn T. Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1.” 21 The belief that gay fathers promote risky behavior is often expressed in the claim that gay men will inspire risky sexual behavior in their children. 160 places for children, because he believes that the coupling of two men produces a far more sexually charged environment than the coupling of a man and a woman in the traditional family, due to the “naturally” large sexual appetites of men. 22 At the beginning of this chapter, I pointed out how arguments against same- sex marriage can also function as arguments for traditional gender roles. Here, the necessity of gender roles (and gender role models, which I will address momentarily) also functions as an argument for the absolute necessity of both mothers and fathers, an idea that has been challenged by feminists, single parents, LGBT activists, same- sex families, and even advances in reproductive technology. 23 The legalization and possible institutionalization of same-sex marriage threatens the binary that social and religious conservatives have constructed between husband and wife, or father and mother. As legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford puts it, “[s]ame-sex marriage seems to undermine these very sex-specific statuses, leaving everyone a sex-neutral ‘applicant.’” 24 This cultural anxiety surrounding the loss of gender roles and gender identity was evident in a Family Research Council ad that ran in major California newspapers after the state’s supreme court legalized same-sex marriage in May of 2008 (see Figure 4.1 on the next page). 22 Jeff Laszloffy (president, Montana Family Association), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 23 Take, for example, recent scientific claims that it will soon be possible to generate sperm cells from skin cells, enabling lesbian couples to have biological children together See Constance Holden, “Sperm From Skin Becoming a Reality?” Science, April 15, 2008, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/ cgi/content/full/2008/415/2 (accessed May 1, 2008 archived http://www.webcitation.org/5XbIfJ3BQ). 24 Richard Thompson Ford, “Hate and Marriage” 161 Figure 4.1: Family Research Council's “Father's Day” Ad for California Introducing the ad to the organization’s supporters, FRC president Tony Perkins condemns the idea, advanced by what he refers to as “four activist judges,” that mothers and fathers, who offer gender-specific types of love to their children, can be replaced by the gender-neutral “Parent #1” and “Parent #2.” 25 He continues: 25 Tony Perkins, “Happy Parent Number 1 Day!,” Family Research Council, June 13, 2008, http:// www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WA08F28 (accessed June 13. 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5Yy4KYHP9); 162 Probably unaware of the irony, the California Supreme Court has ruled that this coming Monday, the day after Father’s Day, California will put its official stamp of approval on the intentional creation of permanently fatherless (or motherless) families. If it stands, this ruling will effectively eliminate the true meaning of Father’s Day, which is to honor the men in our lives who have played a unique and truly irreplaceable role. 26 The ad then juxtaposes the occasion of Father’s Day with the concept of gender- neutral marriage licenses and birth certificates, reminding Californians to “Enjoy this Father’s Day” because “it might be [their] last.” 27 It concludes with a reaffirmation of mother-love and father-love: “Every Child Deserves a Mom and Dad.” 28 Gender conservatism is thus marshaled to prop up ideological conservatism, and to argue that gay and lesbian parents (or single parents, for that matter) cannot be both mother and father to their children. “We should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion of radical feminists that ‘daddies can make good mommies,’” warns Dr. David Popenoe, advocate of the traditional family and co-founder of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, “The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary – culturally and biologically – for the optimal development of a human being.” 29 Here we see an explicit statement of gender essentialism – the belief that 26 Tony Perkins, “Happy Parent Number 1 Day!” 27 Family Research Council, “FRC’s Father’s Day Ad for California,” http://down loads.frc.org/EF/EF08F16.pdf (accessed June 13, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Yy4R4xyd). 28 Ibid. 29 David Popenoe, Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage are Indispensable of the Good of Children and Society (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 197. 163 men and women are defined, in opposition to one another, by a central and unchanging essence – being used to support the argument that neither fathers nor mothers can be considered “optional” to the healthy psychological and social development of children. In an interesting twist on nature versus nurture, opponents of same-sex marriage and parenting are arguing that the “natural” differences between men and women are necessary for optimal nurture. Or, as Stanton puts it in his discussion of innate gender differences and parenting, the “diversity between ‘fathering’ and ‘mothering’ provides children with a broader, richer experience of contrasting relational interactions – more so than for children who are raised by only one gender.” 30 In other words, gay or lesbian parents are depriving their children of the positive influence of either femininity or masculinity. The previous chapter documented how conservative opponents of same-sex marriage use social scientific studies as empirical “proof” that the sexual orientation of parents makes a significant difference to children’s psychological, emotional, and social development. They marshal similar evidence to prove why gender matters. As I mentioned above, this gender argument is rhetorically advantageous for a number of different reasons, particularly because it allows conservative activists to draw from their established rhetorical store of arguments against other kinship structures that threaten the nuclear family model, like divorce or single parenthood. The social scientific evidence used to support these arguments is similarly fungible. Studies or empirical arguments about the social consequences of children growing up without a 30 Glenn T. Stanton, “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1.” 164 father or mother can be used both to discourage single parenthood and oppose same- sex marriage or adoption. 31 In this context, such studies also function to reaffirm the essentialist belief in a strong biological basis for gender and gendered behavior. As others have noted, biology and “nature” have played a significant role in the discourse of the same-sex marriage debate (and the larger debate over the social acceptance of LGBT individuals). 32 In a 2000 Witherspoon Lecture to members of the Family Research Council, J. Budziszewski, a leading public intellectual of the Evangelical movement, urged opponents of homosexuality and same-sex marriage to use the design of the human body to argue their position. His description of the act of intercourse between two men is intended to illustrate how biology can be used as an argument for the “truth” of religious conservatives’ opposition to homosexuality: Our whole physical and emotional design speaks to us of God’s purposes. Interestingly, at the only place in the whole Bible where the expressions natural and unnatural are used, they’re used in reference to normal and perverted sexuality […] When Paul calls homosexual union contrary to nature, he’s not banking on the fact that his readers have studied natural law; he’s banking on the fact that our very bodies speak to us. For example, when a man puts the part of himself that represents life into the cavity of another man that represents decay and expulsion, there is just no way to make the act mean something different from “Life, be swallowed up in death.” We know this in our very bones. The final lesson, then, is that although our opponents 31 Brenda Hunter, The Power of Mother Love: Transforming Both Mother and Child (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 1997); Kyle Pruett, Fatherneed: Why Father Care is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child (New York: Free Press, 2000). 32 See, for example, Janet E. Halley, “Sexual Orientation and the Politics of Biology: A Critique of the Argument from Immutability,” Stanford Law Review 46.3 (1994): 503-568; Qazi Rahman and Glenn D. Wilson, “Born Gay? The Psychobiology of Sexual Orientation,” Personality and Individual Differences 34.8 (2003): 1337-1382. 165 may deny the human design in their ideologies, we can count on their knowing it actually. Their hearts know better than their minds. 33 When asked about the use of social scientific evidence or “natural law” in the same- sex marriage debate, the conservative activists that I spoke with acknowledged that, given the increasingly secularized nature of American society, appeals to nature tend to be more rhetorically effective than appeals to scripture or to a Christian moral ethic. “We’re not a Christian nation anymore” said Jeff Laszloffy. “I think if I come out there and just point to the Bible and say ‘This verse here says you should do this, this way,’ that’s not going to hold sway with a whole lot of people.” 34 Scientific studies, on the other hand, have helped him find arguments supporting his position that persuade a larger, more secular audience. This dependence on scientific data may seem at odds with the history of conflict between religion and science, 35 but the daily e-mails that Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council send out to their supporters suggest that these activists accept the scientific research that supports their agenda. Their use of essentialism operates according to same principle. You can see a selective use of essentialism in how conservative opponents of same-sex marriage approach the issues of gender and sexual orientation. Gender conservatism, the belief that one’s gender is both innate and immutable, was evident 33 J. Budziszewski, “Advancing a Heterosexual Public Ethic with Grace, Wit, and Natural Law,” Family Research Council, June 15, 2000, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=WT00E1 (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5WwIxvWlp). 34 Jeff Laszloffy, in discussion with the author, July 2007. 35 Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002). 166 in a statement issued by Jeff Johnston, gender issues analyst for Focus on the Family, in response to a bill passed in Maryland that would prohibit discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation or perceived gender identity: “For the county to mandate that businesses and individuals accommodate gender confusion is to cooperate with deep-seated spiritual and psychological brokenness,” he wrote. “While we have care and concern for those who are at war with their God-given gender, it is wrong for the county to encourage those individuals in their brokenness.” 36 But these conservative activists oppose the argument, advanced by most advocates of same-sex marriage, that homosexuality is just as innate and just as immutable. Most opponents of same- sex marriage believe that homosexuality is a “choice,” 37 and a destructive one at that. The refusal to believe that homosexuality could be innate also manifests itself in the corresponding assertion that individuals – particularly the young and vulnerable – are bring recruited or “taught” how to be gay by members of the LGBT community. 38 Significantly, conservative activists are using essentialist understandings of gender, including what they see as natural and complementary differences between 36 Focus on the Family, “Maryland Residents to Vote on Gender-Identity Bill,” March 10, 2008, http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000006733.cfm (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5WwIcWTbq). 37 Caleb H. Price, “Are People Really ‘Born Gay’?” Focus on the Family Issue Analysis, http://www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/homosexuality/A000007215.cfm (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xeguu9ww). 38 Don Schmierer, An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing the Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth (Orange, CA: Promise Publishing Company, 2002); Louis P. Sheldon, “Homosexuals Recruit Public School Children: Activists Use Issues of ‘Safety,’ ‘Tolerance,’ and ‘Homophobia’ as Tactics to Promote Homosexuality in our Nation’s Schools,” Traditional Values Special Report 18:11 (2003), http://www.traditionalvalues.org/pdf_files/TVCSpecialRptHomosexualRecruitChildren.PDF (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xef6ndKh). 167 women and men, to argue that homosexuality is an unnatural result of socialization. As we saw in the discourse analyzed above, conservative activists also use the idea of natural and necessary differences between women and men to disqualify gays and lesbians from marriage or parenthood. This belief in “natural” difference has often been used as a justification for unbalanced relations of power, in both the public and the private sphere. In fact, the use of gender roles or norms to support specific family structures is hardly unique to the same-sex marriage debate. The responses of LGBT activists are thus most productively viewed as the latest iteration of a long history of feminist critique regarding traditional gender roles and gender essentialism. Challenging Traditional Gender Roles Throughout history, both women and men have been pressured or forced to conform to the gender norms of their particular time. Ironically, the fact that these norms shifted over time, and differed according to culture, race, and class, 39 did little to upset the notion that gender difference was natural, desirable, and absolutely necessary to the social order. The cultural value attributed to the nuclear family in the mid-20 th century stemmed partly from what many perceived as the restoration of natural gender roles, which were disrupted by the military and domestic demands of 39 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism: 1935-1960 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 168 World War II. 40 Thanks to the post-war boom in the American economy and government subsidies in college education and home ownership, more men were able to be the sole financial provider for their families, which made it possible for women to stay home and tend to both the children and the household. 41 But the uneven relations of power in the male-headed nuclear family prompted some women to question both the naturalness and the desirability of traditional gender roles. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a controversial bestseller that argued that women had fallen victim to the false belief that they could only find fulfillment in the execution of “feminine duties” like keeping house, taking care of their husbands, and raising families. 42 Friedan’s book gave voice to what she referred to as “the problem that has no name”: an acute sense of dissatisfaction with domestic – and usually suburban – life that many housewives felt but could not articulate. 43 The feminist thought that emerged out of the 1960s women’s rights and women’s liberation movements provided a vocabulary for discussing the ways in which traditional gender roles, and patriarchal systems of kinship, subordinated or oppressed women. 44 Drawing from earlier work on gender and identity, such as 40 See Life magazine’s December 24, 1956 special issue on “The American Woman,” which celebrates the movement of women from the workplace back into to the home. 41 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 42 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton & Company, 1963). 43 Ibid. 44 Linda Nicholson, “Introduction,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1-5. 169 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, 45 feminist theorists questioned essentialism, ostensibly “natural” differences between the sexes, and the necessity of traditional gender roles. They were particularly concerned with how these conservative beliefs about gender intersected with and reinforced one another: If gender is innate, then perceived differences between the sexes must be the result of men and women’s very different natures. And, because these differences emerge out of nature, the division of labor by gendered traits is natural and, by implication, good. To counter this logic, feminists worked to highlight the oppressive aspects of traditional gender roles, and began to conceptualize femininity and masculinity as historically contingent social constructs, rather than biological destiny. They also explored the connection between family structure and gender oppression. In her 1981 essay, “One is Not Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig points out that the naturalization of the heterosexual nuclear family was just as destructive to the feminist movement as the naturalization of gender. “Not only do we naturalize history,” she writes, “but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible.” 46 In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone argued that continuing social inequality between women and men could be traced back to the nuclear family’s patriarchal arrangement, in which woman were disadvantaged by the biological and 45 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). The Second Sex was first translated into English in 1953. 46 Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 265-271. 170 psychological demands of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing. 47 Feminists working within the Marxist tradition documented how the gendered division of labor extracts hours of uncompensated domestic work from women, 48 a fact that remains true today, even in two-income families where mothers work outside of the home during the day, only to start their “second shift” when they get home at night. 49 As this chapter will document below, the rhetoric of LGBT activists in the same-sex marriage draws heavily from feminist critiques of the traditional family structure, as well as the liberal feminist argument that gender should not matter. But activists’ focus on establishing the innateness of sexual orientation and gender identity may prevent them from contesting the essentialism that informs the conservative position. Contesting Gender Essentialism Taking up de Beauvoir’s argument that “one is not born a woman, but becomes one,” 50 feminist theorists contested the idea of gender as a natural, fixed trait by exploring the various ways in which gender is socially constructed. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argues that women have been understood as the “other” sex throughout history, and that this “othering” can be traced back to human language, 47 Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.” 48 Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” 49 Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 1989). 50 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, vii. 171 which is our basis for knowing everything that we know about the world. According to de Beauvoir, the term “she” has been consistently defined – and devalued – in opposition to the privileged “he,” a pronoun which can stand in for persons both male and female. 51 This discursive construction of difference goes deeper than grammatical conventions like the “generic he.” Etymologically, the word “woman” comes from the Old French word, wifmann, which translates as “female” (wif) “human being” (mann). As cultural critics Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. McGregor Wise note in their discussion of language and identity markers, “mann does not mean a ‘male human being,’ just ‘human being.’” 52 Gender is deeply embedded in human language, rendering the default subject position as male. But language does not just reflect our social understandings or assumptions about men, women, and the differences between them. It also produces and reinforces gender as social fact. Understanding gender as a discursive construct, produced through social interaction, is often difficult. There are plenty of people who readily disagree with political or ideological conservatism, or who dismiss traditional gender roles as archaic and oppressive, but still view femininity and masculinity through the lens of gender conservatism – as innate and fixed qualities that remain constant over time. This understanding of gender was an essential part of the early feminist movement, as the common thread of “womanhood” provided a central essence that women with 51 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. 52 Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. MacGregor Wise, Culture +Technology: A Primer (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 167. 172 different life experiences could organize around. 53 And this understanding continues to resonate with most people’s lived experience of gender – as a central component of our identity, something that we possess from the very beginning of our lives, and express through our appearance and actions. It is also difficult to escape the fact that there are, generally speaking, basic anatomical and even biological differences between women and men. But, as Judith Butler argues in Bodies That Matter, sexual difference “is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices.” 54 In other words, if we perceive significant physical differences between men and women (differences that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be not nearly as deep, uniform, or determining as most people assume them to be), 55 it is because bodily differences have been marked and made significant by discursive practice, the same discourses that constitute and fortify the social constructions of gender in our culture. We find ourselves looking to science, biology, and evolutionary theory to explain gender-based differences in 53 Teresa de Lauretis, “Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 74-89; Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?: A Queer Dilemma,” in Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 395-420. 54 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1. 55 Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Mother Nature and People (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 173 behavior. But this view loses sight of the numerous ways in which bodily difference is converted into gender through social and discursive practice. 56 As Judith Butler has shown in her work, femininity and masculinity must be materialized through a sustained set of acts – practices of appearance and behavior that actually produce the gender that they seem to express. 57 Here Butler is referring to anything and everything we do to make our gender identity clear to those around us, from the style of our clothing to the length of our hair to our manner of speech. The performance of gender can be as simple as putting a pink bow or headband in the hair of a female infant (to prevent others from mistaking her for a boy), or as complex as the hyper-femininity taken on by male performers dressed in drag. Both enact gender through the adoption of social practices traditionally associated with femininity (e.g., the color pink, skirts or dresses, high-heels, make-up, etc.). One of the most significant arguments that Butler makes is her take on the recursive nature of gender performativity. In other words, gender must be constantly reaffirmed and recreated through the performance of femininity or masculinity. We must repeat, over and over again, the practices that identify us as female or male to maintain our gender identity. Butler sees the fact that gender must be performed as something that opens up possibilities for destabilizing gender itself, a proposition that is quite threatening to those who see gender as an innate and enduring part of our identity. 56 Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 57 Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Bodies That Matter. 174 Articulating Gender through Sexuality At this point, it would be reasonable to ask what value feminist theories of gender have for understanding the rhetorical construction of family values in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, two sites of cultural contestation that seem, on the surface, to have much more to do with sexuality than they do with gender. After all, conservative family values activists are not trying to pass laws that define gender as an innate quality that remains constant over time. They are more interested in defining marriage as a heterosexual union. Decency crusaders like the Parents Television Council are not warning parents that their children’s gender identities will be threatened or destabilized by exposure to primetime television. They are far more concerned with the media’s increasing permissiveness toward sex. But viewing gender and sexuality as separate topics directs our attention away from how these and other social markers inform and constitute one another. Historically, sexuality and gender have always been significant, interlocking concerns in cultural debates, often serving as vehicles for the displacement of anxieties about race and class. Historian Rickie Sollinger’s writings on “reproductive politics,” particularly her discussion of the debates over teenage pregnancy, reveal how identity markers such as age, race, or class can produce radically different cultural understandings of the same basic biological event, differences which reflect and lend support to the sexual regulation of nonwhite populations 58 Critical 58 Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 175 sociologist Roderick Ferguson agrees, arguing that critical sociologists must pay more attention to the way that racist practice “articulates itself generally as gender and sexual regulation.” 59 He points out how, throughout our country’s history (and still today), African Americans’ “fitness for citizenship” was determined by the degree to which their “sexual, familial, and gender relations” matched up with or deviated from “a bourgeois nuclear family model historically embodied by whites.” 60 As the first chapter demonstrated, in the current same-sex marriage debate, gay and lesbian couples’ fitness for marriage, a legal and social privilege that has been long associated with citizenship rights, 61 has also been judged (and found to be lacking) according to the same criteria. Feminist and queer theorists have documented how normative sexuality strengthens normative gender, 62 and how gender or sex differences are materialized in ways that support what Judith Butler refers to as “the heterosexual imperative.” 63 Looking back on the attempts of some scholars to treat sexuality and gender as two separate analytical categories, Butler opines that “an important, but not exclusive, dimension of how homophobia works is going unrecognized by those who are 59 Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 3. 60 Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 20. 61 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 62 Rubin, “The Traffic in Women.” 63 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2. 176 clearly most eager to combat it.” 64 Butler, in contrast, bases most of her scholarship on “the idea that sexual practice has the power to destabilize gender,” 65 pointing out that the intelligibility and desirability of stable gender and sexual identities depend on the “unintelligibility” and consequent undesirability of any and all identifications that violate gender and sexual norms. 66 The gender conservatism and negative attitudes toward “aberrant” or “excess” sexuality that characterize family values rhetoric can be read as a discursive construction of this aberration or excess. From this perspective, the regulation of sexuality, whether through marriage amendments or decency legislation, can be read as a means for shoring up normative gender. Challenging Gender in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate Conservative family values activists’ response to same-sex marriage and parenting illustrates this anxiety surrounding the social intelligibility of gender. From the perspective of these activists, the potential legalization of same-sex marriage is threatening not just because it would confer social legitimization on what many conservatives view as aberrant sexual practices, but also because same-sex family structures suggest that gender does not matter when it comes to parenting. “The goal of gay activists isn’t the individual relationship of any two people, despite such statements,” wrote a local supporter of the proposed ban on same-sex marriage in 64 Butler, Gender Trouble, xiv. 65 Ibid, xi. 66 Butler, Bodies That Matter. 177 Montana, in a letter published by the Billings Gazette in 2004, “It is the revision of national policy to say that gender, especially in child-rearing, is inconsequential.” 67 While I take issue with much of this statement, the claim that LGBT activists are interested in making gender less relevant to marriage, adoption, and child-rearing is correct. In the context of the feminist politics discussed above, they are adopting a rhetorical position akin to liberal feminism – arguing that gender should not matter. When it comes to marriage and children, they say, the quality of the relationship is more important than the gender of the people involved. LGBT activists have accused conservative family values activists of missing this key point in their overzealous attempts to preserve traditional marriage and traditional gender roles. According to the Reverend Susan Russell, an Episcopalian minister and advocate of same-sex families, the “unrelenting cultural focus on ‘family values’ that has been dominated by the Religious Right’s obsession about the gender of those who make up a family has included virtually no discussion about the actual values that make up a family.” 68 Others have taken issue with conservative activists’ insistence that both “mother- love” and “father-love” must be present in the lives of children. “What matters is not gender, but the quality of parenting,” argues Dr. Peggy Drexler, a feminist scholar who has focused her work on refuting the conservative claim that motherless or 67 Yvonne Pettit, “Support Federal Marriage Amendment,” Billings Gazette, April 17, 2004, http:// billingsgazette.net/articles/2004/04/17/opinion/export152638.txt (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XfmI9tyP). 68 Reverend Susan Russell, “Thanksgiving Day 2005: ‘Focusing on Family Values,’” Human Rights Campaign, http://www.hrc.org/documents/Thanksgiving_Day_2005.pdf (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XfwI72oO). 178 fatherless households are deficient or harmful to children. “Parenting is either good or deficient, not male or female.” 69 Rather than attempting to appropriate this facet of the family values ideograph, as they did with moral authority, LGBT activists have opted to challenge the very inclusion of gender in “family values.” A lot of the discourse surrounding gender in LGBT activist rhetoric seeks to communicate the same message – that gender does not matter. As Human Rights Campaign activist Jimmy Creech puts it: “What really matters is the quality of the relationship, not the gender of the persons involved.” 70 Gender “balance” does not guarantee a warm and loving family, just as having gay or lesbian parents does not guarantee dysfunction. It is the nature of the relationships that counts. The HRC’s suggested response to the conservative argument that children need both a mother and a father communicates the same rhetorical shift from gender to relational quality: Many of us grew up believing that everyone needs a mother and father, regardless of whether we ourselves happened to have two parents, or two good parents. But as families have grown more diverse in recent decades, and researchers have studied how these different family relationships affect children, it has become clear that the quality of a family’s relationship is more important than the particular structure of families that exist today. In other words, the qualities that help a child grow into a good and responsible adult – learning how to learn, to have compassion for others, to contribute to society and be respectful of others and their differences – do not depend on the sexual orientation of their parents but on their parents’ ability to provide a 69 As quoted in Cheryl Wetzstein, “Boys to Men Minus Dad,” Washington Times, August 30, 2005, http://www.peggydrexler.com/articles/Boystomenminusdad.pdf (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XfmgfnPe). 70 Jimmy Creech, “What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?” Human Rights Campaign, April 24, 2001, http://www.hrc.org/issues/4649.htm (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5XfmvfgYV). 179 loving, stable and happy home, something no class of Americans has an exclusive hold on. 71 The rest of the talking points emphasize that sexual orientation should be a non- issue, but the fact that this statement is offered as a rebuttal to conservative arguments on the necessity of both mothers and fathers makes it clear that we could just as easily say that a quality upbringing does not depend on the gender of one’s parents. Here, LGBT activists are arguing that it is not a matter of providing equal parts mother-love and father-love. It is just about providing love, a gender-neutral practice that all parents can engage in. Lambda Legal frames its legal work on marriage, relationship, and family law in similar terms: “Intimate and enduring relationships are important to all people. So it is crucial for those in same-sex relationships and for all parents and children to be treated equally under the law.” 72 While LGBT advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal have focused their rhetorical efforts on convincing judges and publics that gender does not and should not matter when it comes to marriage and children, they have not devoted much time to contesting the gender essentialism that has come to structure the conservative rhetoric of family values. When I asked Christine Kaufmann, head of the LGBT advocacy group Montana Human Rights Network, how her organization responds to the conservative argument that children need both 71 Human Rights Campaign, “Questions about Same-Sex Marriage,” http://www.hrc.org/issues/5517. htm (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived athttp://www.webcitation.org/5XfqXhv5Z). 72 Lambda Legal, “Marriage, Relationships, and Family Law,” http://www.lambdalegal.org/our- work/issues/marriage-relationships-family/ (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5Xg4Totl5). 180 male and female gender role-models in their lives, her response communicated a familiar critique of the essentialist understanding of gender: “Well, the culture teaches little boys how to be boys and girls how to be girls.” But her next statement brought us back to the argument of parental love being gender-neutral, asserting that it what was most important was for those little boys and girls to have adults who cared about them, “regardless of their sex,” or their sexual orientation. 73 Part of the reason that LGBT activists may be hesitant to contest the view of gender as an innate, fixed component of one’s identity may be found in their own investment in innateness. As I mentioned in the previous analysis of conservative activists’ strategic use of gender essentialism, most opponents of same-sex marriage argue that homosexuality is a “choice” or “lifestyle” that gays and lesbians have somehow opted into. Put on the defensive, gay and lesbian advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign have argued that sexual orientation is not a “choice,” and that gender identity is not a “preference.” Their Straight Guide to GLBT Americans states: “Sexual orientation and gender identity are not choices, any more than being left-handed or having brown eyes or being straight are choices.” 74 Many gay and lesbian individuals also feel that the “choice” rhetoric of conservative family values activists minimizes the discrimination they have faced in their everyday lives. In another letter to the editor, published in the Billings Gazette in 73 Christine Kaufmann (director, Montana Human Rights Network), in discussion with the author, July 2007. 74 Human Rights Campaign, “HRC’s Straight Guide to GLBT Americans,” PFLAG, http://www.pflag scri.org/learning_more/straight-guide.asp (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5XeQXeiWs). 181 July of 2003, a local reader wants the community to understand that being gay is not something he chose. “In fact, sometimes I’ve wished for nothing more than to be able to change my sexuality,” he writes. “I have gone through some of the hardest and most heart-wrenching times in my life because of my sexuality.” 75 This profession of innateness gives LGBT activists and proponents of same- sex marriage something to organize around, and helps them align their cause with a broader civil rights rhetoric. 76 But this investment in the innateness of sexual orientation and gender identity also limits their ability to interrogate the similarly strategic use of gender essentialism by their conservative opponents. Instead, LGBT activists seem to either assume that conservatives’ appeal to traditional gender roles will hold little to no sway with a post-feminist audience, 77 or feel that there are more productive points of clash to be established. But conservative activists identify the “mother-love” and “father-love” argument as one of the most persuasive talking points in their rhetorical arsenal, 78 and have the win-loss record to back up that assertion. This record suggests that gender remains extremely relevant to the debate. 75 Ty Smith, “Voice of the Reader,” Billings Gazette, July 8, 2003, http://billingsgazette.net/articles/ 2003/07/08/opinion/export112959.txt (accessed May 1, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5XfnA1ES6). 76 Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?” 77 Here I am referring both to the historical time period after the “second wave” of feminist politics and theory and to the belief that feminist concerns with traditional gender roles or gender inequality are no longer warranted. 78 Glenn T. Stanton, “Defending Marriage: Debate-Tested Sound Bites,” Focus on the Family, http:// www.family.org/socialissues/A000001140.cfm (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5XjJjc5mj). 182 Gender Normalization in the Decency Debate The majority of this chapter’s analysis has focused on the same-sex marriage debate because the facet of gender is much more salient in the family values rhetoric employed by conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. But this does not mean that gender is absent from the media decency debate. The politics of gender are just used in a less obvious, but just as significant, way. Here, gender norms are crafted through an interlocking discourse of praise and blame, as decency activists applaud characters and programs for providing “positive role models” and criticize others for their negative influence on young viewers. This practice of praise and blame, which I will refer to as “normalizing discourses” from this point on, draw from and reinforce conservative cultural understandings of femininity and masculinity, particularly the erasure or vilification of female sexuality. In many ways, the discursive construction of gender and sexual norms is similar to the discursive construction of the “ideal family” in the same-sex marriage debate. Our personal understandings of what counts as a good family (and what does not) come from the way that others, including our social institutions and media, talk about families. And our judgments about what is ideal, normal, or abnormal are informed by normalizing discourses that circulate through our conversations about family and society, conversations that often end up valorizing the nuclear family at the expense of non-traditional family structures. These norms, in turn, inform our views and opinions regarding the quality of certain family structures. 183 Our understanding of gender norms also emerges from our interaction with the larger culture. We learn how to enact our gender in an appropriate way by observing the actions of the people around us, both immediate and mediated. Feminist theorist Jane Ussher argues that the social and discursive domains of everyday life provide women with the appropriate “scripts” for enacting femininity: Within a discursive account, rather than femininity being seen as pre-given or innate, it is seen as something which is performed or acquired. In the process of becoming ‘woman,’ it is argued that women follow the various scripts of femininity that are taught to them through the family, through school, and through the myriad representations of ‘normal’ gender roles in popular and high culture, as well as in science and the law. 79 It is important to note that this view, which is generally shared by most media decency crusaders, differs significantly from the gender essentialism present in the same-sex marriage debate, which views femininity or masculinity as something that we are born with, rather than something we learn how to produce or perform. Women (and, to a lesser extent, men) have a range of representations from which to choose, but are limited by the scripts available at any particular moment. According to Ussher, in order to be socially intelligible, women must find a fit between their desired enactment of identity and the currently accepted scripts of femininity. 80 As 79 Jane M. Ussher, “Unraveling Women’s Madness: Beyond Positivism and Constructivism and Towards a Material-Discursive-Intrapsychic Approach,” in Women, Madness and the Law: A Feminist Reader, ed. Wendy Chan, Dorothy E. Chunn, and Robert Menzies (Portland, OR: Cavendish, 2005), 33. 80 Jane M. Ussher, Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 184 we will see below, decency crusaders draw from and try to establish new standards of appropriate femininity and masculinity through their evaluation of media content. These standards are communicated through repeated public performances of praise and blame, in the form of online guides to media content, 81 open letters to the FCC or Congress, 82 and news media appearances. 83 In her work on the idealization of thinness in Western culture, Susan Bordo documents how discourses of praise and blame combine to create powerful norms of behavior and appearance, 84 norms that have penetrated so deeply into our culture that we have internalized them. This internalization of normalizing discourse allows gender to function more subversively in the media decency debate, making the gendered facet of family values rhetoric more difficult to detect, and much harder to contest. Michel Foucault discusses the subversive power of this type of discourse in his writings on disciplinary power. Modern society no longer has any “need for arms, physical violence, material constraints,” Foucault argues. “Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own 81 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council is Working to Help You and Your Family Make Better Viewing Decisions…What’s on TV for Your Family Tonight?” 82 Parents Television Council, “PTC Condemns Attempt to Block Broadcast Decency Amendment,” July 12, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/news/release/2007/0712.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xh0sgs9B). 83 Parents Television Council, “The Parents Television Council in the News,” http://www.parentstv. org/PTC/news/main.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5Xh0YBQMR). 84 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 10 th anniversary edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 185 overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself.” 85 This view of power is particularly useful for understanding the pervasive influence of gender norms: “Where power works ‘from below,’” Bordo argues, “prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity (gender among them) are maintained, not chiefly through physical restraint and coercion (although social relations may contain such elements), but through individual self-surveillance and self-correction to norms.” 86 According to feminist theorist Sylvia K. Blood, we rely on these norms to know how to behave in a socially intelligible way. Norms are models, against which the self continually “judges, measures, disciplines and corrects itself.” 87 In the rhetorical tradition, epideictic speech communicates, reinforces, and shapes the common values of a culture through the assigning of praise or blame. 88 The discursive construction of gender norms operates in much the same way. We first learn the norms of appropriately gendered behavior by what we are praised for (or dissuaded from) as children. We continue to learn something about gender norms by listening to or observing what others are praised and blamed for. The many forms of “mother blaming,” to take just one example, tell us something about what women are expected to do (and, perhaps more importantly, what they are expected not to 85 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power (1974),” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 155. 86 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 27. 87 Sylvia K. Blood, Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image (New York: Routledge, 2005), 53. 88 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (London: W. Heinemann, 1926). 186 do). Decency discourse also relies heavily on gender norms to make arguments about what is and is not suitable for children’s viewing. The rest of this chapter will focus on this practice of gender normalization in the media decency debate. Gender Norms and “Family Friendly” Content The debate over decency in the media was reignited on February 1, 2004, with the baring of Janet Jackson’s right breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The public outcry surrounding this incident, and the decency crusades that resulted from it, illustrate the role that gender norms play in decency discourse. A much-anticipated joint performance between Jackson and Justin Timberlake quickly turned into much more than viewers and CBS (who was broadcasting the game) had anticipated. After concluding the song with the lyric, “I’m going to have you naked by the end of this song,” Timberlake ripped away part of Jackson’s top, revealing her bare breast and nipple ring to an estimated 90 million television viewers. 89 Public outrage quickly followed, with the FCC receiving thousands of decency complaints. Even though there were several parties involved in what the media decided to term “nipple-gate,” Janet Jackson was the one who took the most heat from both the public and decency crusaders. She was also left to take most all of the blame. “This was done completely without our knowledge,” said CBS’s entertainment spokesman, 89 Mike McDaniel, “Janet Jackson Started It,” Houston Chronicle, January 1, 2005, 3. 187 Chris Ender. 90 Tom Freston, chairman of MTV Networks, which produced the halftime show for the Super Bowl, claimed that Janet Jackson had pulled this “stunt” without the show’s producers’ or broadcasters’ permission. “We were really ripped off,” he said shortly after the FCC threatened to investigate. “We were punk’d by Janet Jackson.” 91 Even Timberlake claimed to be “shocked and appalled” by the whole incident, denying any responsibility for the exposure that had come by his own hand. 92 Jackson was the one left apologizing. “I am really sorry if I offended anyone. That was truly not my intention,” Jackson said in a written statement released the day after the Super Bowl, in which she claimed full responsibility. 93 But the damage to her image had already been done. The growing public backlash prompted CBS and the Recording Academy to revoke its invitation to have Jackson present at the annual Grammy Music Awards. 94 In stark contrast, Justin Timberlake emerged from the debacle with hardly a scratch. He appeared at the Grammys and enjoyed continued commercial success while Jackson sank out of public view. 90 As quoted in “Jackson's Apology Can't Stem Mass Anger,” ESPN.com, February 4, 2004, http:// sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs03/news/story?id=1724968 (accessed May 9, 2008, and archived athttp://www.webcitation.org/5Xh5guDYS). 91 “Jackson’s Apology Can’t Stem Mass Anger.” 92 As quoted in “Jackson Apologises for Breast Show as Timberlake Says He’s ‘Appalled,’” AFP, February 6, 2004. 93 “Jackson’s Apology Can’t Stem Mass Anger.” 94 “Janet Jackson Will Miss Grammys,” BBC News, February 6, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ entertainment/tv_and_radio/3461031.stm (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5XhHJLyIy). 188 Writing in the New York Newsday one week after the Super Bowl, Cara Williams, a photographer who writes on representations of blackness in popular culture, questioned the fairness of the “indecency” charges leveled at Jackson: Although Jackson quickly claimed responsibility, I find it troubling that all of the blame – such as there's anything to be blamed for – has been heaped upon her. Here's what I saw: a white man reaching out and yanking the covering off of a black woman's breast as he sang words to that effect from his own hit song. I saw her appear to cower and quickly cover herself, shocked and exposed. Why is she the pariah now and he the unwitting victim of her apparently sneaky ways? Why is he still appearing on the Grammys and she is not? That garment didn't pull apart all by itself. 95 Why did Jackson receive such a disproportionate amount of blame? Williams argues that the “indecency” charges leveled primarily at Jackson were the product of deeper cultural anxieties surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. “It’s a familiar trope in American culture – the oversexed black woman, now even willing to whip her tit out on national television,” Williams deadpans. “She surely has to be stopped.” 96 The subsequent accounts of Timberlake’s actions portrayed him as an innocent young (white) man seduced by a much more experienced woman. I have described the Super Bowl incident in detail because it illustrates how cultural understandings of race, gender, and sexuality can inform decency discourse. Overzealous reactions to the mediated portrayal of female sexuality communicate particular gender norms (like the cultural importance given to female chastity), and suggest that the bar for “indecency” may be set at different levels for women and 95 Carla Wiliams, “Body Baggage,” New York Newsday, February 8, 2004, A26. 96 Ibid. 189 men. As I mentioned above, the moral outrage surrounding the baring of Jackson’s breast also served as a significant turning point in the media decency debate. After years of battling first amendment advocates over stricter governmental regulation of media content, decency activists suddenly found themselves awash in public support for their cause. “The Super Bowl really opened a lot of people’s eyes,” said Melissa Henson, director of research for the Parents Television Council, “It got them to pay more attention to the issue of indecency.” 97 It also triggered a wave of crackdowns on television and radio content by the Federal Communications Commission, which had received hundreds of thousands of complaints about the halftime show, 98 and pushed the Parents Television Council into the spotlight. The PTC used its newfound publicity to become a major voice in the media decency debate. A March 2005 Time magazine article remarked on the group’s growing impact: “Almost single-handedly, the PTC has become a national clearing house for, and arbiter of, decency.” 99 The PTC continues to work to set the standards of decency, standards that often rely on conservative and norms of both gender and sexuality. The previous chapter discussed how decency crusades are often motivated by anxieties about parents’ decreasing moral authority in a mediated world, due in part 97 Melissa Henson (director of research, Parents Television Council), in discussion with the author, October 2007. 98 “Mixed Messages: Conservative Advocacy Group Says Television Has No Respect for Religion,” Houston Chronicle, January 1, 2005, 1. 99 James Poniewozik, “The Decency Police,” Time Magazine, March 20, 2005, http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,1039672-1,00.html (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www. webcitation.org/5XhV1SMgS). 190 to the ease with which children can now access “adult secrets” about sexuality. This anxiety over the exposure of innocent children to sexuality is apparent in the PTC’s description of the Super Bowl halftime show, where, as they saw it, “Janet Jackson deliberately exposed her breast to a world-wide audience that included millions of unsuspecting children.” 100 It also informs their recurring criticism of (what they view as) hyper-sexualized female characters, and corresponding praise of chaste portrayals of women. It should be noted that the members of the Parents Television Council, as well as the local decency activists that I spoke with for this project, are sincerely concerned about the influence of mediated sexuality on both boys and girls. They believe that increasing exposure to sexual content is prompting children to become sexually active at younger ages, and to engage in risky sexual behaviors, often with multiple partners, primarily because this type of lifestyle is glamorized in the movies and on television. 101 But when they criticize the hyper-sexuality of media content, they are most often talking about female characters, or the portrayal of women by the media. Male characters are almost never singled out for criticism, suggesting that it is more important to symbolically punish female sexuality. 100 Casey Williams, “MTV Smut Peddlers: Targeting Kids with Sex, Drugs and Alcohol,” Parents Television Council, http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/reports/mtv2005/exsummary.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XhVM9jji). 101 National Institute on Media and the Family, “New Study Links Television in Teens' and Pre-teens' Bedrooms to Risky Behavior,” April 8, 2005, http://www.mediafamily.org/enews/4_8_2005.shtml (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xhbat4Yi); Parents Television Council, “Media Education: Quotes, Studies, Facts on Violence, Sex, and Profanity in the Media,” http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/mediaeducation/main.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xhb9WEgs). 191 In a column criticizing female superhero films like Catwoman and Elektra, PTC activist Rod Gustafson blames the portrayal of “sexually aggressive” females for the bared “fists and navels” of young female viewers. Taking particular issue with the skin-baring costumes of the title characters, he argues that women should not view the sexual freedom of these characters as real progress: I believe women are being sold a false bill of goods when they are told such characters represent progress. Hopefully, most adult females are intelligent enough to see right through these skimpy suggestions. But some young girls must believe it – or how else can we explain the sexually aggressive females in our schoolyards that are baring their fists and navels? 102 Given decency activists’ preference for chaste female characters and negative characterizations of sexual freedom, it is interesting to note how often they employ feminist rhetoric in their criticism of female characters. Gustafson argues that, rather than being empowered subjects in control of their own sexuality, aggressive female characters are the result of the continued objectification of women in the media: The truth is, the objectification of women really hasn't changed as much as we might like to pretend. Sure, the portrayal of the poor helpless female tied- up and gagged, while a male holds a gun to her head, has been deemed politically incorrect. But has that stopped media moguls (still a predominantly male crowd) from coming up with other ways of concocting the irresistible sex and violence cocktail? 103 In the discourse of decency activists, the trope of objectification often accompanies the criticism of sexual content. “So many negative images of women are offered up 102 Rod Gustafson, “EmPOWered Women,” Parents Television Council, February 10, 2005, http:// www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/rgcolumns/2005/0210.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xh20F7fm). 103 Ibid. 192 to audiences every day,” PTC activist Caroline Schulenburg writes in her criticism of the 2006 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. “It's far easier to cause a sensation by letting women be depicted as objects all in the name of innocent fun than to consider the greater good of society and the women who make up more than half of it.” 104 PTC columnist Christopher Gildemeister uses the objectification argument – as well as a frequent target of anti-porn feminists – in a column lamenting the “exploitation of women” by the media. “Since the mainstream acceptance of Playboy magazine and the ‘Playboy Philosophy,’ and the resultant glorification of sexual promiscuity […] popular culture – and particularly television – have increasingly portrayed women as objects to be ogled and used for sexual gratification.” 105 I am not arguing that the objectification of women in the media is not an issue (particularly when it comes to Victoria’s Secret), but the “objectification” trope can and is being used by decency activists to render all female sexuality worthy of criticism. Even though the Parents Television Council exerts a great deal of effort cataloging the content of the programs it evaluates, the association of women with sexuality does not appear to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This type of content analysis also fails to consider contextual factors that might challenge the PTC’s characterization of female characters as “sexual objects.” Instead, any sexual 104 Caroline Schulenburg, “Worst TV Show of the Week: The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on CBS,” Parents Television Council, December 14, 2006. http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/bw/ 2006/1214worst.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 & archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xh2G8QPr). 105 Christopher Gildemeister, “Culture Watch,” Parents Television Council, February 6, 2006, http:// www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/culturewatch/2006/0206.asp (accessed February 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xhfxhhf0). 193 image of a woman is deemed to be a negative portrayal, and is subsequently blamed for its negative influence on young viewers, particularly young women. 106 At the same time, the positive role models identified by the PTC are the chaste or asexual female characters found on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon. The interlocking discourses of praise and blame that circulate in the decency debate draw from and reinforce conservative norms of female sexuality, norms which are informed by the same ideologies supporting traditional gender roles in the same-sex marriage debate. Conclusion This chapter has argued that gender is a significant facet of the rhetoric of family values, even in debates that do not – on the surface – seem to be about gender. It explored the strategic use of gender essentialism in the same-sex marriage debate and the normalizing discourses of gender in the media decency debate. By examining the latter, we saw how the public media criticism performed by decency crusaders serves an epideictic function, producing interlocking discourses of praise and blame that both draw from and constitute gender norms articulated through sexuality. As these normalizing discourses circulate through society, they become internalized sources of self-discipline, which inform our own performances of gender. Gender has played a more explicit role in the same-sex marriage debate. 106 See Parents Television Council, “Worst TV Shows of the Week: Gossip Girl on CW,” November 19, 2007, http://www.parentstv.org/ptc/publications/bw/2007/1119worst.asp (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XhghxDtV). 194 From a rhetorical perspective, conservative activists’ renewed emphasis on gender has been one of the most significant shifts in the family ideograph, a shift that reveals how this discourse is constrained and enabled by the historical moment that family values activists find themselves within, and by the rhetorical moves of their opponents. After LGBT activists appropriated the conservative argument that two married parents were essential to the development and well-being of children to argue for the legalization of same-sex marriage, conservatives were forced to refocus the discourse of family values. The resulting argument, that children need mother- love and father-love for optimal development, uses gender essentialism strategically, to disqualify gay- and lesbian-headed households from the start. LGBT activists have contested conservative claims regarding the importance of gender to marriage and parenting, but have not addressed the essentialism that supports these claims, either because they do not consider it worthy of contention, or because they also rely on essentialism for political organization and claims of innate sexual orientation. Unfortunately, this leaves LGBT activists unable to exploit the weaknesses and contradictions present in conservatives’ essentialist arguments. For example, in the same article in which Focus on the Family’s Glenn T. Stanton argues for innate gender differences between women and men, he claims that heterosexual families are superior because “Mothers and fathers both help little girls and little boys learn how to grow to be women and men.” 107 The social constructivist logic that lurks behind this claim undermines the essentialism that the conservative case 107 Glenn T. Stanton. “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 2.” 195 for mother-love and father-love is built on. If little girls and little boys need to learn how to be women and men, then gender may not be quite as innate as Stanton and other conservative family values activists claim, and it might be equally possible for children to learn gendered practices from same-sex parents, or society at large. The various uses of gender in both debates illustrate conservatives’ deeper anxieties over the loss of traditional gender roles and stable gender identity. It also reveals how these anxieties about gender are often articulated through arguments about sexuality. These rhetorical practices take place across multiple sites of cultural contestation, not just the same-sex marriage or media decency debate. For example, in the current debate over the inclusion of transgendered individuals as a protected class under the terms of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, conservative activists have used an implied threat of sexual violence to argue against a subjective understanding of gender identity. “What will prevent the 250-pound linebacker from deciding he wants to share the locker room with the cheerleaders?” 108 asked Robert Tyler, counsel for the conservative organization Advocates for Faith and Freedom, in an e-alert to Focus on the Family supporters. This chapter has explored the rhetorical function of gender, and the articulation of gender concerns through arguments about sexuality, in two particular sites of cultural contestation. But, as Mr. Tyler’s remarks suggests, the relevance of its insights may well extend beyond these particular issues. 108 Focus on the Family, “California Family Council Sues State over Gender Redefinition,” November 28, 2007, http://www.citizenlink.org/CLBriefs/A000006000.cfm (accessed May 9, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XhuNqcjQ). 196 Chapter 5: Conclusion Most people see the rhetoric of “family values” as empty language, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Or they just think of it as a bad argument, something that would never convince the rational voter. The anecdotal evidence that I have gathered while talking about this research with colleagues and friends has confirmed this suspicion. But I would argue that this view of “family values” is wrong in two important senses, and that we dismiss this rhetoric at our own peril. First, the claim that “family values” is a meaningless term or ridiculous argument obscures the real material impact that this discourse continues to have. The influence of “family values” rhetoric in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates illustrates this impact. Libraries have blocked patron access to important health information because of fears that innocent children will stumble across pornographic images online. Broadcasters can be fined a half million dollars for airing “indecent” content. But the material impact of “family values” has been the most significant in the same-sex marriage debate. With the help of “family values,” proponents of traditional marriage have passed propositions or statutes that ban same-sex marriage in every state outside of Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, and California. Over half of these states (26) have banned it by amending their constitutions, creating a permanence of 197 discrimination that is difficult to overturn. 1 Without the rhetoric of family values, it is likely that we would not have the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which invalidates the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution in the case of same-sex marriage and prevents the federal government from recognizing the unions of gay and lesbian couples. This act means that same-sex couples – even in civil unions, domestic partnerships, or state-recognized marriages – are denied 1,138 benefits and protections afforded to married couples and their children under federal law. 2 The protections and rights denied to same-sex couples go beyond tax breaks and social security benefits. Gay and lesbian couples do not, for example, have the same immigration rights, so they cannot bring a partner to the United States from overseas like their heterosexual counterparts can. They may not be able to visit their partner in the hospital, and, in the event that their partner is incapacitated, may have no say in important medical decisions. 3 If not outright prevented by state law, they have great difficulty adopting or fostering children. And without the protections associated with having married parents, even the children in gay- and lesbian-headed 1 At the time of this writing, in the summer of 2008, conservative activists in California have collected enough signatures to put an amendment banning same-sex marriage on the November 2008 ballot. See Alliance for Marriage, “California Voters Deliver Over 1.1 Million Signatures to Protect Marriage: Latino Community Holds the Key to Protecting Marriage,” April 23, 2008, http://www. allianceformarriage.org/atf/cf/%7B628E9C62-BA3C-4DF4-A705-32A04E443F80%7D/PRNEWS WIRE_CA_Voters_Deliver_04_23_08_915P.pdf (accessed May 12, 2008 and archived at http:// www.webcitation.org/5XmKTEOXD). 2 Lambda Legal, “What’s In A Number?” http://data.lambdalegal.org/pdf/fs_whats_in_a_number.pdf (accessed May 12, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XmMLWn5T). 3 Human Rights Campaign, “Family Matters: Securing Equal Treatment under Federal Law for Same- Sex Couples and Our Children,” April 8, 2008, http://www.hrc.org/documents/Family_Matters_ brochure.pdf (accessed May 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XjHhztZ5). 198 households are at risk. In the event of divorce or the death of a parent, children may have no biological and thus no legal ties to a person who raised them from infancy. 4 Outside of the same-sex marriage and media decency debates, “family values” has been used to alter the conditions of the social welfare system, 5 promote abstinence-only sex education programs, 6 and force women to view high-definition ultrasounds of their fetuses before they are legally allowed to have an abortion. 7 For a discourse that many people see as overly idealistic and disconnected from reality, it has certainly had a material impact. In other words, any investigation of the rhetoric of family values should be more than just academic. Scholars should also consider the pragmatic and persuasive impact of this discourse on contemporary society, paying particular attention to the question of when and why “family values” succeeds. This project has attempted to do just that, by examining the normative and disciplinary aspects of family values discourse from a rhetorical perspective. 4 Lisa Bennett and Gary J. Gates, “The Cost of Marriage Inequality To Children and Their Same-Sex Parents: A Human Rights Campaign Foundation Report,” Human Rights Campaign, April 13, 2004. http://www.hrc.org/documents/costkids.pdf (accessed and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/ 5XmQHYwJi). 5 Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 Family Research Council, “New STD Data Shows Need for Abstinence Education, Says Family Research Council,” March 13, 2008, http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=PR08C05 (accessed and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XmNsGsSr). 7 Focus on the Family, “South Dakota Shows Ultrasounds to Women Before Abortions: A Dozen States Take Advantage of Technology to View Preborn Babies,” March 20, 2008, http://www.citizen link.org/CLNews/A000006898.cfm (accessed May 12, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation. org/5XmNPIl0m). 199 Summary of Chapters The policies and practices outlined above run counter to the mistaken assumption that the rhetoric of family values is unconvincing. But the primary goal of this project has been to challenge the commonplace observation that “family values” is empty or otherwise devoid of meaning. As an ideograph, the term is certainly ambiguous, and can thus be mobilized to justify a variety of causes. The deployment of arguments about the importance of marriage to child welfare by both conservative opponents of same-sex marriage and LGBT marriage proponents illustrates this versatility. But, as this project has documented, there are specific and recurring facets of “family values” that can be traced across multiple sites of cultural contestation. This project has explored three of the most prominent facets of the rhetoric of family values – a nostalgic view of the past, a concern with the moral authority of parents over children, and anxieties about gender identity – as they appear in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates. The theoretical foundation of this project rests on previous scholarship that has conceptualized “family values” and other talk about the family as a discursive formation, a disciplinary tactic, and an ideograph. The first chapter discussed how the traditional nuclear family has been discursively constructed as the “ideal family,” and how this discursive formation has been and continues to be used to stigmatize families that fail to adhere to this “ideal.” The contemporary conservative backlash against same-sex families has a significant social history, and incorporates much of the same rhetoric that has been and continues to be used to construct non-white or 200 non-patriarchal households as substandard. In 1965, the Moynihan Report attributed the violence and poverty that disproportionately affects the black community to the lack of fathers in the African-American home. 8 In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle blamed the violence in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts on the participants’ “lack of family values,” and blamed the fictional television character of Murphy Brown for glamorizing the single motherhood that he saw as the cause of many of the problems in Watts. 9 Today, over 40 years after the publication of the Moynihan Report and over 15 years since Dan Quayle sought to make an example out of Murphy Brown, conservative groups like Focus on the Family are still employing the same arguments about ideal family structures to construct gay- or lesbian-households as lacking in essential ways. 10 This use of the rhetoric of family values in the same- sex marriage debate (and the related debate over the adoption or fostering of children by gay and lesbian) shows how “family values” also functions as an ideograph, by warranting particular policies or actions taken in the name of the family. Extending Michael Calvin McGee’s theory of the ideograph, and Dana Cloud’s analysis of the ideographic use of “family values” in the 1992 presidential 8 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, Office of Public Policy Planning and Research of the Department of Labor, 1965). 9 Andrew Rosenthal, “After the Riots; Quayle Says Riots Sprang From Lack of Family Values,” New York Times, May 20, 1992, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D6143CF933 A15756C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 (accessed February 1, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Xj94IEg2). 10 Glenn T. Stanton. “Why Children Need Father-Love and Mother-Love, Part 1,” Focus on the Family, August 23, 2003, http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000001142.cfm (accessed February 29, 2008 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5ViCmuiVG). 201 campaign, 11 this project argued that “family values” should be conceived as a multi- faceted ideograph, one which can be both unreflectively deployed and discursively manipulated by activists in order to bring particular facets into focus, while dimming the view of others. The renewed focus on gender by conservative activists discussed in chapter four demonstrates how gender, specifically the “necessity” of supposedly natural differences between men and women, has obscured the previous focus on the importance of marriage to creating a stable home environment for children. It also illustrates why the discourse of family values is fundamentally rhetorical – the focusing and refocusing of its various facets occurs in response to the rhetorical situation and historical circumstances faced by activists. The analysis of the facets of nostalgia, moral authority, and gender in chapters two through four explores the rhetorical shifts in “family values” that have taken place in the same-sex marriage and media decency debates. Chapter two documented how conservative activists from Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and Alliance for Marriage focus their discourse on nostalgic recollections of the past. This nostalgia discursively constructs the past as an ideal space and time in American history, and attributes the social stability of the 1950s era United States to the dominance of the nuclear family structure. The economic and structural factors that made the traditional family possible – such as government 11 Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 387-419; Michael Calvin McGee, “The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1-16. 202 subsidized housing and education, as well the gender norms required to maintain the model of the male breadwinner and the female homemaker – are thus erased through selective memory, suggesting that all we need to return to the golden era of the mid- 19 th century is a renewed commitment to the traditional family and “family values.” Conservative activists then use the idealized image of the past that they have created to frame same-sex marriage and media indecency within a narrative of decline. Opponents of same-sex marriage point to the decline of the traditional family in American culture, while decency crusaders seek to call attention to what they see as the steady degradation of popular culture. The policies advocated by these activists – banning same-sex marriage on the state and federal level, and stricter regulation of television content through FCC or advertiser pressure – are thus presented as a means for slowing, or even reversing, perceived social decline. LGBT activists have not focused their efforts on explicitly contesting the idealized portrait of the past presented by conservative activists. Instead, they have constructed a counter-narrative of progress based on key advancements in the history of the LGBT rights movement, and worked to keep their supporters optimistic about the future. Proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage urge their supporters to remind the public that the proposed federal marriage amendment would be the first time in recent history that the U.S. constitution has been amended to restrict rather 203 than expand the rights of a particular class of people. 12 In this narrative, bans on same-sex marriage appear as an obstacle to the continued progress of human rights. Anti-censorship activists that place themselves in opposition to groups like the Parents Television Council also take issue with the narrative of decline, accusing decency crusaders of an overly idealistic view of past media content. Chapter three explored the focus on moral authority in the rhetoric of family values. It provided a historical perspective on current social anxieties surrounding children and media technologies, anxieties that can be traced all the way back to Plato’s concern with the negative impact of “bad stories” on children’s souls in The Republic. 13 The Platonic view of the innocent and unknowing child, seen as a tabula rasa upon which ideas (both good and bad) are indelibly impressed, remains with us today. It manifests itself in our continuing concern with media effects, court decisions that regulate content based on hypothetical child audience members, 14 and legislation like the Children’s Television Act and the Children’s Online Protection Act, which reflect our twin desires to increase the positive impact of media (through educational programming) and decrease the negative influence of media. Chapter three also documented how media, particularly new media technologies, have been constructed and thus understood as usurpers of parental authority, giving children 12 See Human Rights Campaign, “Background and Key Points on Marriage,” http://nmmstream.net/ hrc/downloads/meetup_docs/marriage_keypts.pdf (accessed December 10, 2007 and archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5TvPxiMYM). 13 Plato, “The Republic,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 1016. 14 FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). 204 access to the adult world before they are mentally and emotionally equipped to handle it. These anxieties over children and media are both a motivating force and rhetorical tactic of decency crusaders. Mounting concern about the possible effects of television on children gives the Parents Television Council a reason to exist. It also enables them to present themselves, their web resources, their technologies of moral authority, and the media policies they lobby for, as means for retaking some of the moral authority parents have ceded to the media. The focus on and rhetoric of “negative influence” is similar in the same-sex marriage debate, which is disturbing when one considers the fact that gay and lesbian parents have been equated with violent or highly sexual media content in the context of family values discourse. And, just as the Parents Television Council devotes entire sections of its website to showcasing research studies that have found statistically significant effects of media on children, conservative activists in the same-sex marriage debate nearly always cite research that “proves” that gay and lesbian- headed homes are not the best place for children. These studies are often combined with anecdotal evidence and hypothetical examples to construct gay and lesbian parents as unfit or even dangerous moral authorities for children. In terms of the three major facets that this project has explored, LGBT activists have done the best job of contesting the conservative claim that they are fundamentally bad parents. They have marshaled scientific studies that find little to no difference between their children and the children who are raised in heterosexual households, and have offered compelling personal testimonies in an attempt to illustrate how they are just 205 like any other parents. But it is important to note that, given the lack of strong longitudinal data on same-sex families, these questions of fact are fairly difficult to settle. It is likely that we will see dueling social science studies well into the future. Chapter four concluded the project’s analysis of the rhetoric of family values by considering conservative activists’ explicit and implicit use of gender in the same- sex marriage and media decency debates. It argued that gender is an important, and in some cases a structuring, facet of the “family values” ideograph, even in debates that do not seem to have much to do with gender. The renewed focus on gender by conservative advocates of the traditional family has been one of the most significant rhetorical shifts in the discourse of family values. If conservative activists can convince the broader public (and the courts) that children really do benefit from the “natural” differences between men and women, and that both mothers and fathers are necessary for optimal child development, then they will have succeeded in their attempt to disqualify same-sex families from the start. LGBT activists, drawing from the theory and rhetoric of the second wave of the feminist movement, have made strong arguments for why gender does not and should not matter more than the quality of the relationship between parent and child. Their response to the claim that children need both mother-love and father-love is that love is not gendered. It remains to be seen whether the general public, which still exists in a rather conflicted relationship with the legacies of feminism, will accept this counter-claim. Gender is less explicit but equally present in the media decency debate. While gender essentialism is the primary rhetorical tactic employed by conservative 206 activists, gender normalization is at work in the decency debate. The scapegoating of Janet Jackson after her “wardrobe malfunction” in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show demonstrates how decency discourse both draws from and reinforces cultural understandings about gender (and, in this case, the articulation of gender and race). The texts produced by decency crusaders reveal how discourses of praise and blame, such as the Parents Television Council’s “Best and Worst TV Shows of the Week,” 15 work together to police performances of gender, particularly performances of femininity. By praising the portrayal of women as chaste or asexual, and criticizing sexual or aggressive female characters for having a negative influence on young girls, decency crusaders perpetuate conservative ideals of femininity that have often been used to police female sexuality. Contribution of Research While this project has focused most heavily on conservative activists’ use of family values rhetoric, it has also documented the appropriation and redeployment of the ideograph by individuals who want nothing to do with the conservative cause. LGBT activists and some anti-censorship activists have tried to use the rhetoric of family values to advance their own causes, LGBT activists by arguing that the extension of marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples will strengthen already existing (and yet to be formed) same-sex families and those who oppose decency 15 Parents Television Council, “Best and Worst TV Shows of the Week,” http://www.parentstv.org/ PTC/publications/bw/welcome.asp (accessed February 10, 2008 and archived at http://www.web citation.org/5VXcj9p3P). 207 crusaders arguing that censorship may actually harm child development, precisely because it keeps children from encountering (and learning from) the realities of the outside world. So, if the rhetoric of “family values” can be appropriated and then reworked to support a new cause, why have conservative activists generally been much more successful in their strategic use of the discourse? This question, which was one of my primary motivations for conducting this research, is difficult to answer. As I mentioned above, it is nearly impossible to argue that the rhetoric of “family values” has not been effective, particularly in the same-sex marriage debate. Without extensive exit poll data on same-sex marriage ban initiatives, or empirical evidence of the opinions and decision processes of voters, legislators, and judges, it is hard to make a definitive argument about why this discourse is persuasive. It may be persuasive to different people for different reasons. But, based on the facets of “family values” analyzed in this project, it is possible to speculate on some of the reasons behind this rhetorical success. The focus on nostalgia, moral authority, and gender that recurs across many different debates and multiple sites of cultural contestation tends to privilege the conservative position. Idealizing the stability of the past becomes more acceptable – and more appealing – in times of rapid change, social upheaval, or economic uncertainty, all apt descriptions for the historical moment that we currently find ourselves within. The way that conservatives have framed concerns about moral authority in terms of the absolute necessity of both mothers and fathers is also persuasive in its flattering suggestion that every man and every woman inherently possesses one of the most 208 important ingredients in the recipe for good parenting. And, as I pointed out in chapter four, the gender essentialism that we, as scholars, take issue with is generally not out of step with how most people view their gender identity. The “naturalness” of this argument might make it more persuasive to those who would generally reject the traditional gender roles advocated by groups like Focus on the Family. Given the fact that LGBT activists have been highly unsuccessful in their attempts to defeat state- level bans on same-sex marriage, it seems like their best chance may be in the courts, where the discourse of “family values” seems to have slightly less sway. In addition to providing a more rhetorical perspective on the construction of “family values” in contemporary cultural politics, this project has made both methodological and theoretical contributions to the current body of research on “family values.” Previous scholarship on the discourse of family values has been primarily based on textual analysis, with scholars attributing motive and strategy to the producers of this discourse through close readings of the texts produced. The insights that I received from talking with the people who actually produced the rhetoric that I was analyzing were invaluable and often led my analysis in directions that it would not have gone without this first-hand perspective on the debate. Future research on the strategic use of family values should incorporate conversations with the producers of said strategy. If nothing else, it helps to corroborate textual analysis. This project also entered into a scholarly conservation that has been heavily influenced by the Foucaultian tradition of viewing our social world as the effect of – and therefore determined by – discourses. This view has left very little room open for 209 human agency. A critical rhetorical perspective seeks to find a balance between structure and agency, one that acknowledges how the discourses that make up our culture both constrain and enable us. We – along with the social world we live in – are constituted by discourse and always already interpellated by ideology, but we also know how to harness and deploy pieces of this ideology in a way that influences others and can transform the social world. This strategic use of ideology sometimes gets lost when we emphasize the constrained agency of the ideologically produced subject. Viewing disciplinary discourses like “family values” as ideographic enables us to account for both the constraints of ideology and the strategic nature of rhetoric. Additionally, if we as critical scholars are particularly concerned with how ideology works to establish or maintain relationships of power, then we need a theoretical lens that focuses our attention on the actual workings of ideology-in-use. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation explores the evolving use of "family values" as a warrant for the enactment of social policy or censorship in contemporary debates over same-sex marriage and media decency. It argues that " family values" should be read as a multi-faceted ideograph, one that has been focused and refocused by activists in response to specific rhetorical situations, in order to highlight and/or conceal particular ideological facets. The dissertation examines three major ideological facets of "family values ": nostalgia, moral authority, and gender, analyzing how these emphases are constructed and contested by opponents of same-sex marriage, decency crusaders, LGBT rights groups, and anti-censorship activists.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Platt, Carrie Anne (author)

Core Title Focusing the family: the rhetorical construction of "family values" in contemporary cultural politics

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/29/2010

Defense Date 05/28/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cultural politics,family values,OAI-PMH Harvest,rhetoric

Language English

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Goodnight, G. Thomas (committee member), Gross, Larry (committee member), Hays, Sharon (committee member)

Creator Email cplatt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1445

Unique identifier UC1143417

Identifier etd-Platt-20080729 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-93457 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1445 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Platt-20080729.pdf

Dmrecord 93457

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Platt, Carrie Anne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu