The Battle over Marriage

Gay Rights Activism through the Media

Leigh Moscowitz

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780252079603, 9780252038129
• eBook ISBN: 9780252095382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past decade, the controversial issue of gay marriage has emerged as a primary battle in the culture wars and a definitive social issue of our time. The subject moved to the forefront of mainstream public debate in 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began authorizing same-sex marriage licenses, and it has remained in the forefront through three presidential campaigns and numerous state ballot initiatives. In this thorough analysis, Leigh Moscowitz examines how prominent news outlets presented this issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life.

 

During this time, LGBT rights leaders sought to harness the power of media to advocate for marriage equality and to reform their community's public image. Building on in-depth interviews with activists and a comprehensive, longitudinal study of news stories, Moscowitz investigates these leaders' aims and how their frames, tactics, and messages evolved over time. In the end, media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause. Media exposure gave activists a platform to discuss gay and lesbian families. But it also triggered an upsurge in opposing responses and pressured activists to depict gay life in a way calculated to appeal to heterosexual audiences. Ultimately, The Battle over Marriage reveals both the promises and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.

1. Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility

My marriage, it's my center. It's the core of who I am as a human being. It's the base that you turn back to.

—Carol Adair, who married her lesbian partner of 25 years in San Francisco in February 2004

There are millions of Americans angry and disgusted by what they see on TV—two brides, two grooms, but not a man and a woman. This is the new civil war in America.

—Randy Thomasson, executive director of the Campaign for California Families

For nearly a decade, longtime partners Davina Kotulski and Molly McKay celebrated Valentine's Day by dressing up in traditional wedding garb: Davina in a tux, Molly in a white gown. They stood in line with hundreds of opposite-sex couples at San Francisco's city hall to request a marriage license. Every year, they were denied one. As a committed lesbian couple and activists in the movement for marriage equality, Davina and Molly rehearsed their annual futile quest for a marriage license precisely so that they would be turned down in front of local television news crews and newspaper photographers. With the goal of creating, as Davina put it, “a media stir,” they came year after year to protest their exclusion to the institution of marriage, to “render visible the discrimination we face on a daily basis.”

On February 16, 2004, Davina and Molly's desire for a state-sanctioned wedding was finally fulfilled. Capturing headlines around the globe, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of California law. Approximately 1,400 gay and lesbian couples, many of whom had traveled hundreds of miles to wait in line overnight in the cold rain, met in San Francisco to be a part of the media-dubbed same-sex “marriage marathon.” Millions of Americans who tuned in to national and local television news broadcasts witnessed something they had not seen before, which for most was beyond their imagination: gay and lesbian couples getting married “legally”—at least what was considered temporarily legal. By the end of the week, more than 3,900 gay and lesbian couples were married.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: San Francisco sheriff's deputies place handcuffs on same-sex couple Molly McKay (right) and Davina Kotulski (left), longtime activists in the marriage equality movement, after they staged a sit-in protest on February 14, 2011. Close to a dozen same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses were arrested after the demonstration inside the office of San Francisco's county clerk. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The matrimonial marathon that took place in San Francisco was one of the most visible moments in a series of legal and cultural events that catapulted the issue of gay marriage to the center stage of mainstream cultural debate.¹ In the 2000s same-sex marriage emerged not only as an important election year issue but also as a central battle waged in the culture wars. Homosexuals’ bid for marriage rights quickly became a wedge issue, “one of the cultural fault lines dividing the two Americas” in what was already a contentious political climate (Rosenberg & Breslau, 2004, p. 23).

Moreover, the intense news coverage of the divisive issue in the U.S. media focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. Stories like those of Davina and Molly were featured in national newsmagazines and on morning news programs. The topic of gay marriage became a front-page story in leading national newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Local papers across the country, especially in conservative regions, gave the issue “dramatic play” (Jurkowitz, 2004, p. 1). Images of same-sex couples waiting in line to obtain marriage licenses led the local and evening newscasts. Almost overnight, as USA Today reported, gay marriage replaced abortion as “the most volatile social issue” in the 2004 presidential election (Page, 2003). As lead anchor Tom Brokaw proclaimed to television news audiences on NBC Nightly News, “Never have the words ‘I do’ been so divisive” (Reiss, 2004, May 16).

Today, of course, these stories and images of same-sex nuptials are almost passé. By 2013 thirteen states and the District of Columbia had legalized marriage for same-sex couples, and think tanks and media outlets alike showed a sea-change in growing public support. In 2008 a Newsweek poll declared a “gay marriage surge,” and surveys from the Pew Research Center showed that by 2012 more American adults favored same-sex marriage (48 percent) than opposed it (43 percent) (Pew Forum, 2012). That figure represents a 17 percent increase from 2004, when only 31 percent supported gay marriage and nearly twice as many Americans opposed it (Pew Research Center, 2012).

This shift in increasing public support for gay marriage is perhaps most visible in the arena of electoral politics. In 2004 the George W. Bush reelection campaign ran on, and many would argue won on, an anti–gay marriage platform. Eight years later, in a televised interview that attracted worldwide news attention, President Barack Obama told ABC's Robin Roberts that same-sex marriage should be legal. A mere four years earlier, support for gay marriage on the national stage was the equivalent of campaign suicide—a politically volatile hot potato that no candidate wanted to touch. During the 2012 election season, however, gay marriage headlined at the Democratic National Convention, the first time ever that the issue of marriage equality was introduced in a major party platform. While pundits and strategists questioned the Obama camp's motives during this election season, no one could ignore how the center of gravity on the issue had shifted. As Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, told the New York Times, “The majority of voters are comfortable with the position Obama has taken on [same-sex marriage]. The issue is a defining one for younger voters, who see it as a litmus test of whether someone is in sync with modern times and their generation” (Baker, 2012).

But on the issue of same-sex-marriage rights, contradictions abound. President Obama's personal proclamation for marriage equality came the day after voters in North Carolina—also the site of the Democratic National Convention—passed an initiative to ban same-sex marriages (even though gay marriage was already illegal in the state). Consistently, gay marriage measures have been defeated at the ballot box, losing in total 32 statewide referenda that have gone up for public vote. It wasn't until November 2012 that voters approved gay marriage rights through the electoral process, making same-sex marriages legal in Maryland, Maine, and Washington State.

To date, battles continue over the legality of California's Proposition 8 (“Prop 8”), which in 2008 outlawed same-sex marriages, a crushing defeat for the gay rights movement. After a dizzying number of legal twists and turns, in August 2010 U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down the California voter initiative as unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriages in the state once again. Prop 8 proponents appealed the decision, and the case now awaits hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This book is concerned with the media coverage that helped to define and shape one of the most contentious social issues of the last decade, the same-sex-marriage debate. Through an analysis of media reports and in-depth interviews with leaders of the modern gay rights movement, The Battle over Marriage offers a critical and longitudinal examination of how media frames and activist discourses evolved surrounding this definitive civil rights issue. My focus is from 2003 to 2010, a period of intense media scrutiny, legal activity, shifting public opinion, and evolving political discourses.

This study interrogates the aims and challenges of leading gay rights activists who sought to harness the power of mainstream news media to “change hearts and minds”—to advocate for their cause and reform images of their community. In doing so, I join an evolving academic and popular conversation about how news coverage frames contemporary social issues and movements. This book also speaks to a growing body of work on the emergence of gays and lesbians in the media and popular culture, using news narratives and representations as a critical but under-studied source of information about gay and lesbian life.

Who was granted a voice in mainstream media debates on this controversial civil rights issue? How did gay and lesbian rights groups attempt to shape coverage of the debate? What images and narratives about gay and lesbian life did activists foreground? What were the dominant journalistic devices—including frames, sources, and visual images—that media storytellers relied upon to produce this story for news audiences? And in what ways did the media attention surrounding the marriage issue reshape the structure, organization, and goals of the contemporary gay rights movement? These are the central questions I am concerned with in this book. To investigate these concerns, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with the nation's leading gay rights activists at two different time periods in this debate—in 2005 and again in 2010—in order to reveal the behind-the-scenes goals, strategies, and struggles of social movement actors who worked within the confines of commercial news media to “sell” gay marriage to a largely unreceptive American public. I also conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of news media texts throughout this time period, including prominent, large-circulation newsmagazines; national newspapers in print and online; national network television news broadcasts; and prime-time television news programs. Ultimately this project shows the complex ways that media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause, revealing both the progressive potential and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.

Before I identify the major intellectual frameworks for the study of gay marriage in the news and why they matter, I want to return to the story of Molly and Davina. For them, a couple who had celebrated their union in a commitment ceremony with family and friends six years earlier, the experience of being “backed by the law” at San Francisco's city hall in 2004 was transformative. Davina explained to me the cultural significance of marriage as society's “shorthand for who gets what and who is related to whom.”

On that day in 2004, Molly and Davina also became national media spokespersons. The traditional act of sealing the ceremony with a passionate kiss was captured by videographers, newspaper photojournalists, and magazine photographers. Molly and Davina's climactic kiss of conjugal bliss morphed into an iconic symbol for the gay marriage movement, appearing in regional newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle; in national publications like Newsweek, Time, and USA Today; in two documentary films; and on several television news programs.

This couple's story points to the two central concerns of this book. First, I am interested in how activists like Molly and Davina talk of marriage, a historically exclusionary institution, as a route to inclusive citizenship and cultural acceptance. The media landscape has been an important site of struggle for challenging and (re)defining marriage, an institution imbued with cultural meanings and social significance that are largely taken for granted. Defining marriage in particular ways legitimizes some individuals and relationships by prohibiting others. Because marriage is irrevocably tied to citizenship and nationhood, the gay marriage debate is not only about homosexuals’ bid for marriage rights but also about how we define ourselves as a culture and a nation. Narratives of gender, race, sexuality, nationhood, and family are intertwined with news discourses about same-sex marriage.

Second, Molly and Davina's story highlights how the gay marriage debate became largely a mediated issue in public discourse—an issue we learn about and experience through newspapers, magazines, television news programs, and web stories. Coverage of same-sex marriage in mainstream news connects with larger theoretical concerns about how social movements gain access to the media and the politics of media representations.

To understand the significance of stories like Molly and Davina's, and the process by which these stories become media spectacles, it is first necessary to position media coverage of the gay marriage controversy within several larger intellectual frameworks in the fields of media studies and queer studies. To begin this discussion, I briefly outline the major legal and political developments in the United States that catapulted gay marriage onto the front pages of prominent national newspapers and magazines. Next I highlight why this study is important by connecting my work to the major bodies of scholarship on the visibility of gay and lesbian people in the news and popular culture; the complicated interdependent relationship between social movements and media; and the role of marriage as a political and social institution. Finally, I briefly explain how I selected the news stories and activists for this study, and I outline the plan of the book.

Same-Sex Marriage: Legal and Political Contexts

The evolution of the gay marriage debate in the United States has many different histories with multiple beginning points. In subsequent chapters I reflect more on the origins of the debate, especially from the perspectives of gay rights activists, some of whom have been fighting for marriage equality since the early 1980s. For my purposes here, I focus on the central events that piqued the public interest beginning in the mid-1990s and culminated in the explosion of media attention in the early to mid-2000s.

The fight for marriage equality in the United States has evolved on a state-by-state level, with early activity focused on Hawaii. A great deal of public attention centered on the 1996 Hawaii court case in which it was ruled that banning same-sex couples from participating in marriage was unconstitutional. The lower court sent the controversial case back to the state's supreme court. Fearing that Hawaii would become the first state to legalize same-sex unions, Congress passed a federal act in 1996 dubbed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, this act defined for the first time on a federal level the term “marriage” as between one man and one woman and the term “spouse” as someone of the opposite sex. DOMA also gave states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

In 2000 the issue once again made headlines when Vermont became the first state to offer civil unions that legally recognize same-sex couples. These civil union arrangements provide gay couples some, though not all, of the rights and protections that marriage affords heterosexual couples. Vermont's then governor, Howard Dean, signed the civil union bill into law. These early steps in Hawaii and Vermont paved the way for the contemporary controversy over gay marriage in the 2000s, the time period that is the central concern of this study.

Beginning in the summer of 2003, a series of legal and political events pushed gay marriage to the forefront of mainstream politics. In June 2003 Ontario, Canada, legalized marriage for same-sex couples, opening the door to thousands of Canadian couples, as well as American couples who crossed the border, to marry without restrictions. That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that all 13 remaining state sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Considered a landmark case for gay civil rights, conservative judges and activists warned that the ruling would open the door to the legalization of same-sex marriage (see chapter 3 for a discussion of this case).

At the state level, gay rights activists and same-sex couples who wanted to marry legally challenged state-level DOMA legislation. Activists argued that to deny gays and lesbians marriage rights under the law was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In November 2003 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on behalf of seven plaintiff couples in Goodridge et al. v. Department of Public Health, arguing that the state constitution mandates that same-sex couples should have access to civil marriage. Three months later, in February 2004, the Massachusetts court clarified its earlier decision in Goodridge and ruled that anything less than marriage—including civil union arrangements—fails to provide equal protections for same-sex couples and is therefore unconstitutional under the law.

That same month, as detailed earlier in this chapter, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom defied California law and issued same-sex marriage licenses to more than 3,900 gay and lesbian couples. Newsom told Nightline's Ted Koppel that his motivation to issue the licenses was to end what he saw was a discriminatory practice in the state of California, and also in part as a retaliatory response to the Bush administration's political agenda. As he explained on Nightline, Newsom was emphatic that buried in the president's 2004 State of the Union Address was a thinly disguised attempt to amend the Constitution in order to ban same-sex marriages. “It was crystal clear to me, and I imagine the tens of millions of Americans that were watching [the State of the Union], that this was a political strategy for the White House to play some divide and conquer strategy to placate their right, in an effort to advance a political agenda…The president, he can fly on some aircraft carrier any time he wants, but he should keep his hands off the Constitution” (Sievers, 2004, February 24).

In the days and weeks that followed, several other cities like Portland, Oregon, and New Paltz, New York, began issuing licenses to same-sex couples. Immediately, President George W. Bush publicly announced his support for the Federal Marriage Amendment that would make same-sex marriages in any state illegal and unconstitutional. Echoing concerns from his conservative base, he said that in the wake of the Massachusetts and San Francisco decisions, “activist judges” and local authorities had too much power to redefine “the most fundamental institution of civilization” (Sievers, 2004, February 24). Since the Constitution was first ratified, it has been amended 27 times, the first 10 of these making up the Bill of Rights. Thus, President Bush argued before Congress that the matter of gay marriage had risen to the level of constitutional concern: “If we are to prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever, our nation must enact a constitutional amendment.”

Three months after their decision to make same-sex marriages constitutional, on May 17, 2004, the state supreme court denied a last-minute appeal and Massachusetts became the first state to issue state-sanctioned same-sex marriage licenses (DePasquale, 2004). In front of television cameras and newspaper reporters, all seven plaintiff couples from the Goodridge case married that day. The historic moment in the movement for marriage equality drew attention from media outlets throughout the country and around the globe (the “I do” heard around the world), as “the dramatic cultural milestone generated headlines and commentary everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Prague” (Jurkowitz, 2004, p. 1). The director of Newseum, a website that posts the front pages of 300 newspapers on a daily basis, proclaimed that the same-sex-marriage case in Massachusetts “is what we call an ‘A story day’” (Jurkowitz, 2004, p. 1).

Nevertheless, the successful “cultural milestone” that gay rights activists had achieved in the courts did not appear to hold up in the court of public opinion. The day gay and lesbian couples were first married in Massachusetts, anti–gay marriage protesters chanted, “We'll remember in November.” On Election Day, November 2004, they held true to their promise. The intense campaigning efforts of gay marriage opponent groups like the Defense of Marriage Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the Christian Coalition, resulted in ballot initiatives in 11 states to ban same-sex marriages. Many political analysts argued that the issue of gay marriage “was a key part of Karl Rove's turnout strategy,” bringing social conservatives supporting George W. Bush to the polls in record numbers (Rosenberg & Breslau, 2004, p. 23). By comfortable margins, all 11 states—including Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah, and Oregon—voted to prohibit same-sex marriages. In some states, including Ohio, Michigan, and Utah, anti-marriage groups successfully pushed measures that not only banned gay marriage but also repeale...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility
• 2. Fighting the “Battle to be Boring”: Marriage as a Portal into the Mainstream
• 3. “The Marrying Kind”: The Face of Gay Marriage in the News
• 4. Gay Marriage Goes Prime-Time: Journalistic Norms Frame the Debate
• 5. Speaking Out: Representing Gay Perspectives in News Discourse
• 6. Conclusion: The Trouble with Marriage
• Appendix: Studying Gay Marriage in the Media
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author