Weathering Change

Gays and Lesbians, Christian Conservatives, and Everyday Hostilities

Thomas J. Linneman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814752876
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Pacific Northwest is known for its diverse, unusual politics. There are thriving gay and lesbian communities and populations of staunchly conservative Christians. Both groups wield political power out of proportion to their numbers and yet both feel beleaguered. How do members of these groups—both community leaders and everyday citizens—perceive the political climates that surround them

This book tells a tale of two Northwestern cities: Seattle, well known nationally for its liberalism, and Spokane, its conservative cousin to the east. Weathering Change characterizes the ways these liberal and conservative environments translate into hostility and hospitality for the Christian conservatives, gay men, and lesbians who live within them. Linneman gives us a firsthand account of how people from both groups think about social change in relation to the media, the public, the government, their communities, and their opposition. Indeed, we gain much needed insight into why Christian conservatives view the progress of the gay and lesbian movement as such a threat.

1

Experiencing Political Climates

There was a student last March who, someone got into his locker, didn’t even break into it, it must have been a friend with a combination, and wrote “Die Fags” and put swastikas and stuff. And so I testified in front of the school board—my dad was on it as well, and still is—and the general reaction: all they did was give the kid a new locker and that was about it. And so I tried to call their bluff and asked them to include [sexual] orientation in their harassment policy, but the districts aren’t willing to do that. Even though most of the administrators here are at least sympathetic if not supportive on some level, they still realize that it would probably cost them a bond or a school levy, and so they’re not willing to go there yet. It’s still OK to use words like “fag” in the hall, but not other words, and that’s clear.

If you go down to the part of the country where I was raised in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, you will have 103,000 people in a football stadium, and they will have a pastor open the whole thing with a prayer. To acknowledge God, to acknowledge his sovereignty over everybody, and it will be in Jesus’ name. Here, they would never dream of doing anything like that. Never dream of it. Never be permitted, in fact. For example, whereas politicians are free to stand at the stadium with their signs up at certain times of the year, a few years back when we sent some Christians over there to hold some signs up with some scripture and to hand out tracts, they were hustled off by the security.

These quotations come from two very different residents of Washington State. The first is a gay activist in Spokane; the second a Christian conservative pastor near Seattle. Though they make vastly different claims, their stories are similar in that they starkly characterize the political climates of their respective local environments. Spokane and Seattle—two cities on opposite sides of the state—have contrasting political landscapes: Seattle is well known across the state for its liberal climate, Spokane is markedly more conservative. In this book, I demonstrate how these differing political climates manifest themselves in the lives of Christian conservatives, gay men, and lesbians in both cities.

Every significant effort for social change begins with an assessment of current conditions and the potential for change. This assessment of obstacles, receptivity, and hostility in the social and political environment is one of the most crucial factors in the decisions about when to act, where to act, and how to act. Yet few scholars of social movements have focused attention on how competing activist groups assess the specific climates within which they hope to effect social change. We usually consider social change to be a slow-moving, societal-level phenomenon. However, change can occur within far more localized contexts: states, cities, football stadiums, school hallways, workplaces, newspaper pages, and people’s daily interactions. I show that ordinary people are quite adept at perceiving these political climates and changes within these climates, and argue that these perceptions have important consequences.

To illustrate this phenomenon, I concentrate on people from two groups who currently are experiencing a great deal of change: gay men and lesbians on the one hand, and Christian conservatives on the other. How do people in these two groups perceive the political and social climates around them? How do they know if their environment is hostile or hospitable, or becoming more hostile or more hospitable? In the following chapters, I offer many examples of people formulating perceptions of political climates using a wide array of information. Members of these groups carefully analyze how the media treat their group and other groups. Some demonstrate creative ways of assessing how the general public feels about their group. Many infuse local and national government actions with much symbolic meaning. They assess the health of their own minority communities in a variety of ways. And they sometimes focus very specifically on the actions of the other group (Christian conservatives on gays, gays on Christian conservatives).

Even as the two groups share a number of foci, they differ in important ways as well. While the members of both groups concentrate on each of these elements of the political climate, Christian conservatives often pay attention to different aspects of it than gay men and lesbians. I compare and contrast how these two groups perceive their political and social envi­ronments. By examining how individuals from these groups regard the hostility from the various elements of the political and social climate, I offer comparisons that show where these groups have common ground.

Such an exploration should be of interest to a number of audiences. First, of course, are Christian conservatives and gay men and lesbians. Some of my claims may simultaneously provoke nods of agreement from some and shaking heads of disbelief from others. Indeed, some may even find the overall comparison objectionable. However, I believe that members of both groups will learn much about their own group as well as something about the “opposing” group from this book. Scholars who study social change and social movements may discover insights into how social change is experienced by both activists and nonactivists. Finally, this book is for anyone interested in learning more about how social change actually happens in American society, and about two groups who are at critical junctures in their respective histories.

Understanding Political Climates

Politicians, activists, and journalists utter the phrase “political climate” on a regular basis, yet political scientists and sociologists hardly ever use the term except in the most cursory way. A search for the term in major newspapers yields these and hundreds of other headlines:

“Political Climate Warms to Initiatives on Quality of Life”

“’99 Political Climate Threatens Proposals”

“Republicans Aim for Goal of Senate Control, Political Climate Favors GOP, Making 5-Seat Gain Possible”

“Packwood, Sensing Change of Climate, Weighs a Race”

Using such reports, it is possible to piece together a popular definition of political climate. One thing is clear: political climate is a powerful phenomenon. It has the potential to threaten policy outcomes, to make other outcomes possible, and to determine whether or not a politician will even run for office. A second observation concerns the levels at which a political climate operates. Since its implications concern both large-scale political structures and individuals, political climate is a phenomenon that is active at both the macro and micro levels of analysis. A third characteristic involves its ability to warm up or cool off, to change over time. The climate can become more hostile toward some elements while being more hospitable toward others, and it can do so very quickly as a result of a single current event. A final, crucial piece of the puzzle lies in the final headline: political climate is something that can be sensed, either by political bodies or individuals. This points to the subjective quality of climate: what one person senses, another may not. Because it is a perceptual phenomenon, climate can sometimes be manipulated by those who have a stake in it. While these are important clues, it remains difficult to decipher what political climate actually is. The term seems to have been institutionalized in mainstream discourse to the point that it requires no introduction, making it difficult to develop an explicit definition based on usage in popular media. However, combining these characteristics results in the following initial definition: political climate is a powerful, multilevel, dynamic, socially constructed phenomenon similar to a mood or an attitude.

My research goal is to understand how individuals perceive their political and social environments. With this goal in mind, I conceptualize political climate somewhat differently from popular discourse, though the underlying idea remains similar to the concept described above. My definition is as follows:Political climate is a socially constructed manifestation of hostility or hospitableness toward different individuals or groups in society on a variety of levels, ranging from the interpersonal to the global.

I conceptualize political climate as a phenomenon that has no objective existence. Its effects occur only via the perceptions of individuals or groups. While most political climates definitely lean one way or another, toward the hostile or the hospitable, often the climates are quite mixed and open to interpretation. People in differing social situations, working with different backgrounds of information, can interpret objective information in completely different ways. The individual, in my conceptualization, is an active perceiver of the climate, bringing it into existence. This is not to say that her perceptions are completely her own. On the contrary, her perceptions of the climate are socially constructed: she is influenced by other perceivers and several other factors I discuss below.

People can perceive climates on a wide variety of levels. Just as weather climates are often highly localized, political “microclimates” also exist (Gardner 1995). In addition to the national level (the most typical popular treatment of climate), I argue that climate can also be perceived at the state level (a state’s climate can be hostile), the city level (a city within that state can have a hospitable climate), and the local level (something could lead an individual or group to believe that a certain part of town has a hostile or hospitable climate). All of these combinations raise a plethora of possibilities, as perceptions at one level surely affect perceptions at another level.

The Elements of Climate

One’s overall view of the political climate is made up of assessments of a number of elements: media representations, the opinions of the general public, practices of government entities, critical events, and the actions of social movement organizations (both one’s own and one’s opposition). While particular individuals may deem some of these factors more important than others, most people are savvy enough to understand how each of these elements affects the overall level of hostility their group faces. Here I briefly discuss each of these elements.

The media play an important role in people’s assessments of the levels of hostility toward their groups. In his research on working-class conversations about politics, William Gamson (1992a) found that his subjects would employ experiential knowledge, popular wisdom, and media discourse to make their points. A particular individual may not have any experiential knowledge about a given topic, but he or she is still able to understand the topic and be affected by it due to the treatment of the topic by popular wisdom or by media discourse. Large-scale, climate-altering events are most likely to be experienced only through media discourse (Mutz 1998). People know of an event, yet have experienced only the mediated version of it. People who lack experiential knowledge may be more likely to employ mediated knowledge in their talk of climates. It is important to note that those who lack both experiential and mediated knowledge may still have strong opinions about the political climate, however uninformed those opinions may be. The media play a particularly important role in broadcasting the actions of social-movement organizations. Given that many movement goals involve changing the public’s perceptions about some element of society, a movement action that fails to garner media attention is often considered a failure. The media have been instrumental in popularizing—and depopularizing—social movements (Priest 2001; Gitlin 1980). To get the media’s attention, social movement activists will often go to extreme lengths, often negatively affecting their cause:

Public officials and heads of large established organizations receive automatic standing from the mass media by virtue of their roles. This is not so for movement actors, who must often struggle to establish it and may require extrainstitutional collective action to do so. Members of the club enter the media through the front door, but challengers must find their way in through a window, often using some gimmick or disorderly act to do so, which may impair their effectiveness once inside. “Those who dress up in costume to be admitted to the media’s party,” Gamson and Wolf-sheld point out (1992), “will not be allowed to change before being photographed.” (Gamson and Meyer 1996, 288)

This leads to a paradox: gaining media attention could ultimately create a more hostile climate for the movement’s cause. It is not merely the ability of a movement to capture media attention that matters; the type of attention is just as important. I will illustrate these claims in the coming chapters in the context of the media attention given Christian conservatives and gay men and lesbians. Both groups see media attention as critical to their success.

Research within the field of public opinion has generated the concept of opinion climates. In her work, Noelle-Neumann (1993) sought evidence for what she called a “spiral of silence.” In a spiral of silence, one direction of public opinion becomes dominant, causing those who hold the opposite opinion to silence themselves for fear of being isolated or exposed as deviant. As more and more people silence their opinions, they feed this spiral until it seems that there is only one possible opinion on a subject. In a typical Noelle-Neumann experiment, the researcher would put the subject in a hypothetical situation in which the subject was sharing a train cabin with one or more persons who held the opposite opinion on certain issues (e.g., corporal punishment, the effects of smoking). When the subject’s opinion on the issue was outnumbered two-to-one, he would be significantly less willing to talk about the issue. While her research offers evidence that people do think about climates before they act, the contrived nature of the hypothetical situations does not allow us to study the subjective and socially constructed nature of climate perception.

Unfortunately, little research has examined the processes through which people perceive public opinion. Jelen (1992) suggests that those with deviant opinions may be more likely than others to recognize that their opinions are deviant, and thus may communicate these opinions infrequently. Glynn (1989) offers evidence that people have a tendency to misperceive the opinion climates around them, overestimating either the conservativeness of a climate (if the respondent is liberal) or the liberalness of a climate (if the respondent is conservative). Lang and Lang (1993) propose that in uncertain climates, people rely on others’ opinions more often, becoming more susceptible to the power of rumor. Kuran (1995) theorizes that people, under pressure, may not only silence their opinions, but falsify them, making the perceived opinion climate appear more uncertain, or even very different from the actual opinions of members of the public. However, our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in perceiving public opinion is elementary at best. This book uncovers the ways both Christian conservatives and gay men and lesbians perceive public support or disdain, even in the absence of conventional, poll-oriented evidence.

The claim that government actions toward particular groups affect the climate perceived by these groups is similar in some ways to the discussion of political opportunity structure, a concept popular in research on social movements. First introduced in the 1970s (Eisinger 1973; Jenkins and Perrow 1977) and later fully developed by McAdam (1982), political opportunity structure concerns the viability of social change in different political contexts:

while excluded groups do possess the latent capacity to exert significant political leverage at any time, the force of environmental constraints is usually sufficient to inhibit mass action. But this force is not constant over time. The calculations on which existing political arrangements are based may, for a variety of reasons, change over time, thus affording certain segments of the population greater leverage with which to advance their interests. (McAdam 1982, 39)

Social movement researchers have shown that these political opportunities can vary over geographic space (Miller 2000; Kitschelt 1986) and time (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; Almeida and Stearns 1998). But in order for an aggrieved population to take advantage of an open political opportunity structure, they have to experience “cognitive liberation” (McAdam 1982): they must see change as possible. James Jasper emphasizes the lack of attention given to the subjective nature of the possibility for change:

Cognitive liberation depends on cultural processes, some of which may be independent of strategies and political structures. For people to think that repression has eased, they need to interpret the pieces of information they receive, which may or may not be accurate. As crowd theorists saw, rumors can be as effective in shifting perceptions as sound information—because they are often taken to be sound. Process theorists have had little to say about this interpretive filter, giving the impression that potential protestors respond straightforwardly to objective conditions and probabilities of success. (Jasper 1997, 37)

With regard to political opportunity structure, then, researchers have paid little attention to the microlevel: how different individuals perceive the political opportunity structure and the ways in which they are affected by it. By analyzing how people perceive an open opportunity structure—or, in my terms, a hospitable political climate—I advance this discussion.

Another way I expand the concept of political climate is to address the importance of critical events in shaping it. A major way people assess political climates is by keeping track of events that could affect the climate. Such events are used by individuals as physical manifestations of the political climate: “Look, there it is,that’s what I mean when I say my environment is hostile.” These events can occur to the climate perceiver himself, or they could be passed on to him by other people or by the media. Gary Alan Fine (1995) calls for the examination of narrative in social movement research: whether they are “horror stories” or “success stories,” people use narrative to spread information about such events. Fine claims that such stories are often overlooked by researchers. Ken Plummer (1995) points out that we now tell stories (i.e., coming-out stories, recovery stories) that we wouldn’t have dared to tell even a generation ago, and studying the nature of such stories could help to understand social change. This element of climate also has connections to concepts in the literature on social problems: typifying examples, which represent a certain class of social problem (Lowney and Best 1995), and landmark narratives, which are definitive stories with especially resonant narrative themes (Lee and Ermann 1999; Nichols 1997). Through the telling of stories, we let others experience events vicariously, and in doing so we let them experience the political climate we have known firsthand. Through such stories about a wide-ranging set of events, from the personal to the media oriented, people partially develop an understanding of the political climates around them.

In characterizing the climate, people also take into account social movement activity. Such activity has multiple effects on political climate. First, it can assist in the goal of getting an issue on the table, bringing the grievances of a particular group to the attention of the media, the public, and the lawmakers. Once the issue is on the table, movement activity can improve the political climate for a particular group. Finally, movement activity can impel countermovement activity, which can create a negative effect on the political climate a group perceives.

In order for the political climate to change, the opportunity for change must first be created. A particular issue must become an issue within the arena of public discourse (Klandermans 1992; Jenson 1987). That is, the issue must become important for a large proportion of the public, or at least a critical mass. If this goal is not achieved, then the likelihood of change in climate is negligible. There is limited space within the public arena, therefore social problems and the social movements connected to them must compete for attention (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988). Social movement activity is often focused on pushing the movement cause into the arena of public discourse. This is especially crucial for those social movements for which a major goal is to change public attitudes about an issue (Scott 1990; Melucci 1985). A precursor to changing one’s mind about an issue is one’s willingness to think about the issue. People may have opinions, but these opinions may be latent and not in the forefront of consciousness. Movements, in accomplishing this goal of getting people to think about an issue, do not necessarily change climates as much as create the possibility for change.

Social movements also may change the climate simply through their presence, manifested in the form of marches or campaigns, bumper stickers or buttons (Noelle-Neu...