The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (13 page)

This 5-to-4 vote by a conservative court was politically motivated. Corporations have much more money to spend on political campaigns than do unions. This ruling gives a huge amount of money to conservatives and hardly any to progressives. Speech, as we have seen, is not just sounding off. If framed and targeted carefully, Citizens United allows conservatives to change the brains of biconceptuals, and win a lot of elections for conservatives and move the country radically to the right.

The Hobby Lobby and Wheaton cases were conservative victories as well. The Hobby Lobby verdict granted First Amendment freedom of religion rights to corporations that are tightly held and operated by a family or small group (more than half controlled by at most five persons). The right given is a
new right
: to ignore a provision of a law applying to a corporation if the small group of individuals owning or controlling the corporation feel that the law violates their religious principles.

This is a new, and very different, metaphorical extension of Corporations Are Persons to First Amendment rights and it opens the floodgates to a huge range of claims to be exempt from provisions of the law on grounds of religious principle as self-defined. In short, it puts corporations above the law. It is a step toward legalizing government by corporations.

This is a radical conservative political decision. Why? Because radical conservatives want to eliminate public resources and public aspects of government—that is, government by laws passed by human legislators. At once, this shifts government from the public to the private sphere and from the human to the nonhuman sphere.

This brings us to another truth unframed in public discourse.

• Corporations govern our lives.

There have been many great innovations made by corporations when they have invested their exponentially accumulated wealth in innovations that improve people’s lives—in useful computer technology, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment, transportation—in area after area.

To my knowledge, in all cases, these innovations that have improved our lives were ultimately made possible by public resources: Government-sponsored research and university training made possible computer science, satellites, medical research and training, and so on in case after case. Every great corporate innovation story simply burnishes the truth that the private depends on the public.

But what is left conceptually unframed and therefore unspoken are the negative effects of the runaway accumulation of corporate wealth. Here is a short list.

•
Increasing corporate lobbying and political contributions.
These effects work largely against the public interest on a huge range of issues—even to the extent that corporations write laws introduced by the legislators they contribute to. The Citizens United decision greatly exacerbated this effect.

•
Increasing externalization of costs.
The wealthier corporations get, the more power they have to use their political influence to avoid regulations. As a result, they can pass along to others the costs of doing business—and thus increase profits even more. The fancy name for this is “externalization of costs.”

A prime example is the dumping of hazardous waste that taxpayers will pay to clean up—or will suffer with. Consider what happens when fracking companies dump pools of polluted water on the landscape, or tear up the land in the fracking process and then leave it torn up, or inject vast amounts of poisonous chemicals in the porous shale rock next to the water table, thus creating polluted drinking and agricultural water. The burden is shifted away from the private corporations and to the public. The prime example, of course, is of corporations emitting the greenhouse gas pollution that has caused global warming. The costs get dumped onto you—whether you’re paying more taxes to mitigate climate change or to clean up after severe storms or you’re paying more for vegetables during severe droughts.

But even when you have to spend your time searching a company website or waiting on the phone to talk to a customer service representative, costs are being externalized: Your time is being spent while the company profits by hiring too few people in customer service. Various forms of “self-service” at gas stations, supermarkets, and big box stores are made to sound like conveniences for you, but they are really ways of making you work for the company for free.

•
Increasing costs to consumers due to monopoly ownership.
For example, some Internet providers with no competition may overcharge and provide minimal service, leaving the customer to bear the burden of exorbitant costs and poor service.

•
Limitations of size options by clothing manufacturers.
Many clothing manufacturers will only make sizes that fit the most normally sized people because it is more profitable than providing sizes for the full range of customers.

•
Increasingly unethical business practices.
For example, General Motors sold cars with known defects that caused deaths, while people in the company knew of the dangers and kept silent.

•
Increasing corporate inefficiency.
Anyone who has worked in a large company is familiar with corporate inefficiency (see the Dilbert comic strip). Health insurance companies, for example, have inefficiency costs that are very high compared with Medicare. Those inefficiency costs are transferred to consumers whenever possible.

•
Increasing corporate management pay and the pressure for short-term profits.
When the very rich get exponentially richer and everyone else exponentially loses access to wealth, there is an inevitable pressure for short-term profits. When corporate managers are in charge of managing corporate wealth, there is an incentive for them to acquire exponentially growing wealth.

To a large extent, corporations govern us and run our lives—for their profit, not ours. The list could go on and on.

To a large extent, the runaway expropriation of wealth pointed out by Thomas Piketty is a result of government by corporation. Piketty points out that a political solution is necessary, but when our politics is governed significantly through lobbying by corporations rather than the public, the possibility of this is greatly reduced.

Conservatives like to rail against “government” as taking away their liberty. But government by corporations probably does far more to take away such “liberty.”

Government by corporation is a major unframed reality. It is systemically linked to the runaway accumulation of our wealth by the very wealthy. Because of the systemic effect of runaway personal and corporate wealth on our politics, both are systemically linked to the threat of global warming to the future of our planet, and to the fundamental split in our politics that is systemically threatening democracy in ways that are not obvious, and are therefore also unframed in public discourse.

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Part IV
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Framing: Looking Back a Decade

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10
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What’s in a Word? Plenty, If It’s Marriage

—February 18, 2004, with some updates in 2014—

The original version of this chapter was written over a decade ago, before the major advances in the acceptance of gay marriage. The successful strategy used what was recommended in this chapter in the first edition of this book: the stress on love and commitment and the generalization to everyone, not just gays.

More than half of Americans now support gay marriage. It is legal in nineteen states. But there is still a long way to go in the other thirty-one states. The conservative framing has not changed: It’s against the Bible; it threatens the very definition of marriage; it’s a lifestyle choice; children will be lured into it; it’s all about sex. Conservatives these days repeat the word
homosexual
, which contains the word
sex
and the slur
homo
.

For example, Texas Governor Rick Perry was reported as saying, “Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that . . . I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.”

For all of that, conservatives are fighting a losing battle against love and commitment, family and community. The younger generation is overwhelmingly accepting.

President Obama entered the presidency not being in favor of gay marriage but being open to “evolving” on the issue. He has now “evolved.” The evolution metaphor suggests an adaptation to the changing political context.

W
hat’s in a word? Plenty, if the word is
marriage
.

Marriage is central to our culture. Marriage legally confers many hundreds of benefits, but that is only its material aspect. Marriage is an institution, the public expression of lifelong commitment based on love. It is the culmination of a period of seeking a mate, and, for many, the realization of a major goal, often with a buildup of dreams, dates, gossip, anxiety, engagement, a shower, wedding plans, rituals, invitations, a bridal gown, bridesmaids, families coming together, vows, and a honeymoon. Marriage is the beginning of family life, commonly with the expectation of children and grandchildren, family gatherings, in-laws, Little League games, graduations, and all the rest.

Marriage is also understood in terms of dozens of deep and abiding metaphors: a journey through life together, a partnership, a union, a bond, a single object of complementary parts, a haven, a means for growth, a sacrament, a home. Marriage confers a social status—a married couple with new social roles. And for a great many people, marriage legitimizes sex. In short, marriage is a big deal.

In arguing against same-sex marriage, the conservatives are using two powerful ideas: definition and sanctity. We must take them back. We have to fight definition with definition and sanctity with sanctity. As anthropological studies of American marriage have shown, they got the definition wrong. Marriage, as an ideal, is defined as “the realization of love through a lifelong public commitment.” Love is sacred in America. So is commitment. There is sanctity in marriage: It is the sanctity of love and commitment.

Like most important concepts, marriage also comes with a variety of prototypical cases: The ideal marriage is happy, lasting, prosperous, and with children, a nice home, and friendships with other married couples. The typical marriage has its ups and downs, its joys and difficulties, typical problems with children and in-laws. The nightmare marriage ends in divorce, due perhaps to incompatibility, abuse, or betrayal. It is a rich concept.

None of the richness we have just discussed requires marriage to be heterosexual—not its definition, its sanctity, its rituals, its family life, its hopes and dreams. The locus of the idea that marriage is heterosexual is in a widespread cultural stereotype.

In evoking this stereotype, language is important. The radical right used to use
gay marriage
; now it’s
homosexual marriage
. One reason, I believe, is that marriage evokes the idea of sex, and most Americans do not favor sex that isn’t heterosexual. The stereotype of marriage is heterosexual.
Gay
for the right connotes a wild, deviant, sexually irresponsible lifestyle.

But
gay marriage
is a double-edged sword. President Bush chose not to use the words
gay marriage
in a State of the Union address. I suspect that the omission occurred for a good reason. His position was that
marriage
is defined as being between a man and a woman, and so the term
gay marriage
should be an oxymoron, as meaningless as
gay apple
or
gay telephone
. The more
gay marriage
is used, the more normal the idea of same-sex marriage becomes, and the clearer it becomes that
marriage
is not defined to exclude the very possibility. The grammar is important.
Gay
is grammatically a modifier specifying a kind of marriage. If you understand the expression, then it is not a contradiction in terms and marriage is not “defined” to exclude gays.

Because marriage is central to family life, it has a political dimension. As I discussed earlier, and at greater length in my book
Moral Politics
, conservative and progressive politics are organized around two very different models of married life: a strict father family and a nurturant parent family.

The strict father is moral authority and master of the household, dominating the mother and children and imposing needed discipline. Contemporary conservative politics turns these family values into political values: hierarchical authority, individual discipline, military might. Marriage in the strict father family must be heterosexual marriage: The father is manly, strong, decisive, dominating—a role model for sons, and for daughters a model of a man to look up to.

The nurturant parent model has two equal parents, whose job is to nurture their children and teach their children to nurture others. Nurturance has two dimensions: empathy and responsibility, for oneself and others. Responsibility requires strength and competence. The strong nurturing parent is protective and caring, builds trust and connection, promotes family happiness and fulfillment, fairness, freedom, openness, cooperation, and community development. These are the values of strong progressive politics. Though the stereotype is again heterosexual, there is nothing in the nurturant family model to rule out same-sex marriage.

In a society divided down the middle by these two family models and their politics, we can see why the issue of same-sex marriage is so volatile. What is at stake is more than the material benefits of marriage and the use of the word. At stake are one’s identity and most central values. This is not just about same-sex couples. It is about which values will dominate in our society.

When conservatives speak of the “defense of marriage,” liberals are baffled. After all, no individual’s marriage is being threatened. It’s just that more marriages are being allowed. But conservatives see the strict father family, and with it their political values, as under attack. They are right. This is a serious matter for their politics and moral values as a whole. Even civil unions are threatening, since they create families that cannot be traditional strict father families.

Progressives are of two minds. Pragmatic liberals see the issue as one of benefits—inheritance, health care, adoption, and so forth. If that’s all that is involved, civil unions should be sufficient—and they certainly were an advance. Civil unions provided equal material protection under the law. Why not leave civil unions to the state and marriage to the churches, as in Vermont, the first state of many to adopt civil unions and later same-sex marriages?

Idealistic progressives saw beyond the material benefits, important as they are. Most gay activists want full-blown marriage, with all its cultural meanings—a public commitment based on love, all the metaphors, all the rituals, joys, heartaches, family experiences—and a sense of normality, on par with all other people. The issue is one of personal freedom: The state should not dictate who should marry whom. It is also a matter of fairness and human dignity. Equality under the law includes social and cultural as well as material benefits. The slogan here is “freedom to marry.”

Back in 2004, when the first edition of
Don’t Think of an Elephant!
was published, a number of prominent Democrats claimed that marriage was a matter for the church, while the proper role for the state was civil unions and a guarantee of material benefits. This argument has always made little sense to me. The ability of ministers, priests, and rabbis to perform marriage ceremonies is granted by governments, not by religions. And civil marriage is normal and widespread. Besides, it will only satisfy the pragmatic liberals. Idealistic conservatives will see civil unions as tantamount to marriage, and idealistic progressives will see them as falling far short of equal protection.

And what of the constitutional amendment to legally define marriage as between a man and a woman? Conservatives will be for it, and many others with a heterosexual stereotype of marriage may support it. But with nineteen states legalizing gay marriage and a majority of Americans for it, such an amendment is now dead in the water.

Progressives have reclaimed the moral high ground—of the grand American tradition of freedom, fairness, human dignity, and full equality under the law. There is no longer a need to talk about civil unions and just the material benefits. The job of ordinary citizens in the remaining thirty-one states is to reframe the debate, in everything we say and write, in terms of our moral principles.

With the divorce rate for heterosexual marriage skyrocketing, the sanctity of marriage is more important than ever. Talk sanctity. With love and commitment, you have the very definition of the marital ideal—of what marriage is fundamentally about. Any couple willing to fight for a public recognition of their love and a lifetime commitment has sanctity on their side.

We all have to put our ideas out there so that political candidates can readily refer to them. For example, when there is a discussion in your office, church, or other group, there is a simple response for someone who says, “I don’t think gays should be able to marry. Do you?” The response is: “I believe in equal rights, period. I don’t think the state should be in the business of telling people who they can or can’t marry. Marriage is about love and commitment, and denying the right to marry to people in love who want a public lifetime commitment is a violation of human dignity.”

The media does not have to accept the right wing’s frames, and in state after state they have not. What can a reporter ask besides “Do you support gay marriage?” Try this: “Do you think the government should tell people who they can and can’t marry?” Or “Do you think the freedom to marry who you want to is a matter of equal rights under the law?” Or “Do you see marriage as the realization of love in a lifetime commitment?” Or “Does it benefit society when two people who are in love want to make a public lifetime commitment to each other?”

Morally based framing is everybody’s job. Especially reporters’.

It has long been right-wing strategy to repeat over and over phrases that evoke their frames and define issues their way. Such repetition makes their language normal, everyday language and their frames normal, everyday ways to think about issues. Reporters have an obligation to notice when they are being taken for a ride, and they should refuse to go along. It is a duty of reporters not to accept such a situation and not to simply use right-wing frames that have come to seem natural. And it is the special duty of reporters to study framing and to learn to see through politically motivated frames, even when those frames have come to be accepted as everyday and commonplace.