Popular Opinion on Homosexuality: The Shared Moral Language of Opposing Views |
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| Authors: | Sarah S. Brown |
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| Affiliation: | Is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently beginning a dissertation on how popular understandings of homosexuality have changed in America during the last century. Her broader theoretical interest is the ways in which changing circumstances provide the opportunity for popular understandings to evolve. |
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| Abstract: | Those on one side of a hostile political debate may feel that their opponents "just speak a different language." I argue that proponents of deeply conflicting opinions may have more in common than they think. I use textual analysis of arguments for and against gay parenting to demonstrate that the opponents–both pro and con–structure their arguments using the same basic set of concepts: family, rights, and prejudice. I argue that people's statements of opinion can be understood as more than manifestations of individual psychology. Rather, people's one-sided arguments are rhetorical attempts to leverage powerful basic ideas of right and wrong as support. Debates, therefore, become battles of competing claims to ownership of basic concepts of good and bad. The basic concepts are beyond debate; the struggle takes place over appropriating them for one's side. In a debate, therefore, those on opposite sides of an issue often "talk right past each other"; those on one side cannot deny the significance of the basic concepts claimed by their opponents, so they generally ignore their opponents'models and instead keep repeating their own. |
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