Voting the Straight Ticket: Media Discourse as a Tool for Transforming Ideologies about LGBTQ People into Law

Abstract

On May 8, 2012, the citizens of North Carolina voted to amend their state constitution to establish marriage between a man and a woman as the only domestic legal union that would be valid or recognized by the state. Although same-sex marriage was already prohibited under a 1996 statute, the amendment, which came to be known as Amendment One, wove this ban more tightly into the state’s legal fabric. Using a critical discourse analytic approach (van Dijk, 1998; Fairclough, 1995, 1998), I examine how, in the six-month period leading up to the ballot measure, pro- and anti-amendment positions were represented in local newspaper coverage as “storylines” that positioned various social actors with respect to dynamics of power and agency. The way that storylines positioned actors mobilized ideologies toward the LGBTQ community to produce and represent voters as particular types of social actors who (should) behave a certain way. Drawing on mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 1998, 2001), I suggest that storylines transformed and homogenized the interests and social practices of a diversity of North Carolina voters, serving as resources for the construction of voter identities that entailed either a vote “for” or “against” the amendment. My findings contribute not only to an understanding of how social knowledge such as ideologies is reflected in discourse practices at a single historical moment, but illuminate how the production of (voter) identity in news discourse is achieved interdiscursively through the linkage of discursive and social practices to the historical sequences in which these practices are situated. As blatant expressions of prejudice continue to decline (van Dijk, 1993), we must attend to the subtle manner in which discriminatory ideologies and attitudes can be embedded in discourse, particularly in cases such as Amendment One, where the outcome of the discursive negotiation of power and authority was objectivized, transforming ideologies about LGBTQ people into law.