Protecting Marriage

EmilyBloom — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:46:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music. This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship. The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees. After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates. Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner? Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Image Credit: Screen Shot Together in Texas

Twogether in Texas, a local HMI campaign, has billboards all over Austin with hugely inflated intimate portraits of couples. According to Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News, Twogether in Texas offers marriage workshops that are not exclusively same-sex. Although Texas has not legalized gay marriage, “non-traditional couples” can participate in these workshops that cover relationship issues such as fidelity, money management and communication. In such cases, is the pro-marriage movement symbiotic with the same-sex marriage movement? Recently, a same-sex couple, legally married in Massachusetts, filed for divorce in Dallas, further challenging the rhetorical constraints of pro-marriage positions.

Image Credit: YouTube

H/T Huffington Post

In a spoof of California’s Proposition 8, the website rescuemarriage.org presents a fake PSA in favor of a fictitious bill called the California Marriage Protection Act. This PSA uses almost identical language as those opposed to gay marriage to argue that divorce is “unnatural like polyester, glasses and twinkies.” This parody addresses the complications of pro-marriage arguments in the context of same-sex marriage debates. On the website this is even more explicit in the article “The Gay Divorcees” in which the author, John Marcotte, goes to torturous lengths to explain why a legally married same-sex couple should not be allowed a divorce because it would be a violation of traditional religious values.

Visual Rhetoric and Invisibility

Sarah Wagner — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:18:28 +0000

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.

I was on the phone with the IRS and they asked me two questions. First, is my last name my married name or my maiden name? Second, on my last return, how did I file? The answer I gave to the first was “married” and to the second was “single”. And I'm being forced to lie, or rather, to leave out part of the story. Sure, the IRS woman doesn't care--married people file single every day--but I hate it. Time after time, I have to answer questions like those the same way. I'm not single, I've been married for three years, and was with my wife for seven before that. My maiden name is my married name; my wife took my last name. D'you see? I'm a woman (if you didn't catch the byline), and I married another woman in Massachusetts before we moved to Texas. Here, I'm married only because I say so. Here, I'm “married.”

So why does this have anything to do with visual rhetoric? Because in one sense it has something very much to do with visibility. I'm not only not married because the text of many of our laws says I'm can't be, but because others' ability to picture in their heads a woman saying “My wife and I were talking the other day...” affects their ability to accept my reality. And it's my inability too: back in Massachusetts, there was a columnist—I forget the name—who wrote every so often for the back page of the Sunday magazine. The back page was on relationships, and this writer was great. Not once, but twice, I thought, “I have to remember to read this writer more often”, and when I looked for the byline, I was caught off guard both times because this person writing “My husband does this and that” was a man.

Another case of visibility--or rather, invisibility--is when I fill out a form. Just take the word “form”: there's form and then there's content, right? So the expectation of the folks handing out and filling out forms is that there will be certain predictable requests for information. We don't read forms for content—we look to see which line takes our name, whether there are brackets for our area code, and so on. The extra boxes giving us more choices to identify ourselves are equally visual arguments. If we agree you exist--Pacific Islanders, “Other” ethnicities, gays and lesbians--you get a box of your own. Again, it's about whether or not people can envision me. Can they picture my relationship in their heads?

viz. - marriage

Protecting Marriage

Visual Rhetoric and Invisibility