Since its release in November, Get Up!’s commercial supporting gay marriage in Australia has garnered substantial social media interest (over four million views on Youtube). The U.S. LGBT news magazine The Advocate called it “possibly the most beautiful ad for marriage equality we’ve seen” (source). Take a look:
From a sociological point of view, what is interesting about this ad is how it avoids the powerful, but charged language of equality and rights. Supporters of same-sex marriage typically frame their cause in terms of non-discrimination (“all people are equal”), non-interference or privacy (“how is my gay marriage affecting yours?”) or in terms of freedom of speech (“I should marry who I want”). See images of posters using this frame here and here.
Rights language such as this, however, comes with the potential of conflicts and trade-offs. Accordingly, opponents of same-sex marriage have often capitalized on this in their responses. This poster, for instance, expresses a fear or mockery of assertive, unbridled individualism. Posters with this frame here.
This “Yes to Proposition 8” video is another good example. In it one woman claims that, if gay marriage is legal, her religious identity will be subject to discrimination and her freedom to speech will be contested.
The language used by the marriage equality movement, then, enables its opponents to re-frame their responses in the same type of language.
This is why the Get Up! commercial is a game changer. Instead of using “rights talk,” it keeps both words and slogans to a minimum. It uses visuals to embed the couple in a network of family and friends. At the end, for example, the camera steps back to show not just the couple but a wider network of people who happily witness a marriage proposal. This approach implicates the happiness of not just two individuals, but a community. The message is that gay marriage is not just about individual rights, but about collective celebration and social recognition.
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Ridhi Kashyap is a researcher in the Migration Group at the Institute for Empirical and Applied Sociology in Bremen, Germany. She studied interdisciplinary social sciences at Harvard University, and was a human rights fellow there after graduating in 2010. She is actively interested in human rights, particularly as they implicate issues of gender, migration, and development.
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Comments 17
EmmaG — January 3, 2012
The opponents to same-sex marriage might be using the language of rights, but they are not very good at it, are they?
If you look at the video, there's two base arguments: 1) same-sex marriage is bad in and of itself and 2) if it is legal, it will become more difficult to oppose it on religious grounds. The arguments for the first one are either so incredibly vague that you can't evaluate them, or they merely state a fact and then expect the viewer to think it's negative ("children will be taught that same-sex marriages are equal to traditional ones!"... "But that's awesome, no?").
There arguments concerning religious freedoms are questionable too, because they all entail limiting the rights of others. I don't know about you, but I think it is totally justified that a doctor can't refrain from providing services because of his personal beliefs. And I do not believe a single photographer has been forced to work at a gay wedding. How is that even supposed to work?
Joseph J Kane — January 3, 2012
Also nicely sidesteps the issue of how governments legally recognizing marriage at all discriminates against all forms of relationships that exist outside of traditional two-person marriage and nuclear family. I don't believe people should be given special rights just because they're in a particular type of relationship. I also don't believe that governments should be so involved in regulating the love affairs of their citizens.
Anonymous — January 3, 2012
I was just about to ask what the Get up! commercial was before I went back and realized that that it was the first video. Sure it is beautiful, but I stronlgy disagree that it's based on a social argument. Maybe in the sense that the relatiohsip depicted goes through exactly the same hoops as we have come to expect from a straight relationship, but otherwise it is exclusively focused on the central couple, appeals to the very personal feeling of being in love, and considering how gay couples have done commitment ceremonies, unifficial weddings and engagements for ages, nothing that ties into the issue at hand. If this really was a game changer, it could have been about friends going to the couple's wedding or the parents interacting with the grandchildren, but in this case the narrative is much more focused on the classical romantic narrative that pretty much isolates the couple in question.
Jess — January 3, 2012
When I first saw the the Getup! ad, I assumed from the first moment that it was about a gay couple... because I can't even remember the last time I saw something represented from a woman's perspective...
Sass — January 3, 2012
I'm not sure you can really use an Australian ad about an issue to argue against American protests on the same issue. Australia isn't America and while we have plenty of homophobic bullshit over here, I don't see the same level of hatred and omg people will marry dogs, as much as I see a (mainly older generation) feeling of this doesn't sit right with me. I'd imagine this ad is trying to get through those uncomfortable feelings rather than take on the bigotry and ridiculous fears shown in the protests.
For what it's worth, marriage in Australia wasn't between 'a man and a woman' until John Howard changed the wording of the laws involved around 2005 - our celebrant told us about it at the time and was very disappointed that there was no news coverage of the change at all. I suspect if Rudd was still PM that change would have been redacted by now. It's incredibly disappointing to me that our current PM is resistant to the values and opinions of the majority of Australian people.
Captain Pasty — January 4, 2012
Oh my glob! Photographers might have to get paid a huge amount of money to photograph a "gay wedding"??? Oh my glob! Would someone please think of the photographers! Those poor, poor photographers...
Quickies: 01/04/2012 - Queereka — January 4, 2012
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SociologicalMe — January 4, 2012
I really don't get the part about how children will be taught that same-sex marriages are equal to "traditional" marriages, and how that's supposed to be somehow bad.
Even if you disagree with same-sex marriage, all children will be taught in school is that the marriages are equal under the law. Then they go home, and the parents can tell them that they have a moral disagreement with the law. I certainly plan to explain to my kid that I have moral disagreements with some laws.
I guess the threat of losing an unearned privilege (like belonging to the majority religion of a country) is hard to distinguish from the threat of losing actual rights?
Andy Niable — January 5, 2012
Another interesting article. But can we please use "Full Marriage Equality" instead of "Gay Marriage" in future headlines and references? It's more accurate and more inclusive.