It's an exciting time for those interested in how marriage equality is being discussed in the media; the coalition government have recently announced that they are preparing a Bill which would allow same-sex couples the same marriage rights as straight couples. Importantly, religious institutions won't be forced to marry same-sex couples if the Bill is successful.
As one might expect, there are arguments being made very loudly for and against the proposal. We're currently collecting data from British newspapers as the story develops, and will be building a corpus to enable us to analyse these coherently. We think it might be interesting to see which authors refer to 'gay marriage' as opposed to 'marriage equality', for example, and to see how religious discourses are used both in favour of equality and against it. The sorts of articles we're interested in include 'Why to be against gay marriage is not bigoted' and 'These equal marriage reforms are historic, because in 21st century Britain the meaning of family goes beyond man, woman and child'.
We're also currently analysing an edition of The Moral Maze which was broadcast in March 2012, when the government first put out a public consultation on equal marriage, using Evaluation framework (Thompson and Huntson 1999) to establish how contributors on both sides of the marriage equality argument use language to frame same-sex marriage as healthy, deviant, positive, dangerous, natural or immoral (amongst other things!). We'll be updating this blog as we get further on with our research.
If any readers come across articles, blogs or other material that they think we should include in our analysis, do let us know!
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Thompson, G. and Huntson, S. (1999) 'Evaluation: An Introduction' in Huntson, S. and Thompson, G. (Eds.) Evaluation in Tests: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-26.
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