The above ad will be more on point when we get to the third Section of the class which deals with marriage equality, Gender & Sexuality, Marriage & Law, but I couldn't resist adding it hear as an example of how the people who are opposed to LGBT equality frame their arguments in order to appeal to the most number of people.
Note that the ad begins with images and sounds of Martin Luther King, Jr., our country's most respected civil rights leader talking about the right to vote. The right to vote to eliminate the civil right of another minority (i.e. the majority should get to vote to decide what rights the minority gets to exercise, for example whether that minority has the right to marry someone of the same sex) is what the argument is.
In addition, harkening back to our current study of LGBT rights in the 1970s and Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign, there is the argument that allowing gay marriage will have "consequences," one of which will be that boys will be taught that they can grow up and marry boys. (The horrors!) But, of course, regardless of whether Minnesota enacts marriage equality, that will always be the case somewhere in the world since marriage equality is an established fact in multiple areas around the country and the world. Other consequences are examples of "movement backlash," in which allowing marriage equality will place people who oppose it to be victims of frivolous lawsuits by activists who will sue them for expressing viewpoints opposing gay marriage.
Who wouldn't want to vote to give THEMSELVES more power? Shouldn't you have the right to decide how other people live their lives? That's one of the implicit messages of NOM's ad.
Discuss.
First of all, I would like to point out the outrageous amount of less-than-subtle propaganda in this ad. It doesn't even try to use rhetoric or logic to convey the message (in fact, some of the sentences are atrocious separately from their content--from a grammatical standpoint alone). This ad relies only on flashing images meant clearly to convey that if you are a strong, moral and upright American, you will vote for the One Man, One Woman candidate. What I took away from the Martin Luther King, Jr. image was pure irony-- I thought he was meant to represent the purity and justice of the American way, something that is clearly lacking in this campaign.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand-- wow. Controlling other people's beliefs (the concept of legislating morality) is really a key foundational point in the debate surrounding LGBT equality. Why must we condemn what we are not? Is it merely, as Hancock points out, to raise our own statuses within the Oppression Olympics? Or do we truly not understand what legislation is built on? If there is one thing Cultural Relativists and more Universalistic-approaches agree on, it's this:
All functioning civilizations have a set of rules set in place specifically for the survival and continuity of the community. For example, murder is condoned and trust is valued across ALL cultures, in that, to have a group of people living together, there must be sufficient trust within the group to ensure that all participants will not, say, murder each other-- thus enabling the continuation of the society.
Beyond that-- there's not call for legislation. Legislation is purely to continue the successful community/country. Legislating who is allowed to love whom does not fit into this category.
... wow that was long.