Marital Suitors Court Social Science
Spin-sters: The Unwittingly Conservative
Effects of Public Sociology
JUDITH STACEY, New York University
This article analyzes the author’s experience performing public sociology on same-sex marriage and gay
family rights issues in order to illustrate the paradoxical and tacitly conservative conditions that structure contemporary public sociological discourse. It demonstrates how, under contemporary conditions of globalized,
market-driven communications technologies and neoconservative discursive frames, performing public sociology
reinforces positivist epistemology, regardless of one’s goals. Paradoxically, the arena of sound-bite sociology exploits
reflexive and semiotic knowledge to convey research in rhetoric that reinforces the positivist, normalizing ideological regime that the former seek to deconstruct.
My only hope is that we as sociologists will come to recognize the value of adding our
research to the policy debates. Sociologists and other social scientists should further engage in
the debates and translate our knowledge into a useable form for the audience that needs it.
—Joyce Iutcovich (2002a)
Calls for sociologists to venture more frequently and forcefully beyond the groves of academe issue forth repeatedly from the pages of the discipline’s professional newsletters. Herbert Gans (2002), for example, laments the paucity of sociologists among the ranks of highly
visible public intellectuals—that selective band of scholars and critics anointed by the guardians of the fourth estate to “comment on whatever issues show up on the public agenda” (p.
8). Gans speculates that the comparatively liberal ideological orientation of most sociologists
works against us here, because “the news media tend unfairly to prefer center and conservative voices” (2002:8). He urges “more of us” therefore to assume the “better, if less prestigious role” of serving as “public sociologist,” a genre of “specialist public intellectuals” who
comment “only on issues to which they can apply their sociological insights and findings”
(2002:8).
Motivated by such convictions, I readily allowed myself to be drawn into a fraught arena
of public sociology sometimes characterized as “the family wars” (Berger and Berger 1984).
Ever since I found myself “hailed” by polemical discourses on “family values,” I have diligently applied my sociological insights in public debates over the causes and consequences of
divorce, fatherlessness, lesbian and gay family rights, and other incendiary features of the
“postmodern family condition”(Stacey 1990). Along with numerous colleagues, I have been
The author is grateful for generous, constructive comments on an earlier draft from Ben Agger, Bennett Berger,
Charles Camic, Bob Connell, Neil Gross, Melanie Heath, and Charles Lemert. Direct correspondence to: Judith Stacey,
Department of Sociology, New York University, 269 Mercer Street, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10003. E-mail:
[email protected].
SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 51, No. 1, pages 131–145. ISSN: 0037-7791; online ISSN: 1533-8533
© 2004 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press,
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Public sociology of all kinds is badly needed.
—Herbert Gans (2002)
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trying to “reframe social phenomena in helpful ways,” as Gans advocates, quite literally, in
fact, on one of the very topics he mentions by way of illustration, “(e.g., to point out that the
family is changing, not declining).” This endeavor has involved me in the four forms of public
sociology Gans recommends, as well as several he does not mention.1 Although I have found
some of this work to be gratifying, even heady at moments, on balance it has proven a rather
sobering experience.
Participating as a public sociologist in the politics of marriage in the United States and
abroad has led me to a less sanguine view than the one I once shared with Gans, Joyce Iutcovich, and many others about the political promise of public sociology. Instead, I have come
to believe that contemporary conditions of public discourse produce several inherently conservative effects, irrespective of the ideological commitments of sociological practitioners.
Drawing upon my participation in public debates about marriage generally, and same-sex
marriage in particular, I depict three paradoxical, rather perilous features of public sociology:
Let a Thousand Marriage Movements Bloom
For several decades now, a thriving industry of journalists, scholars, and politicians has
issued mournful eulogies for what they believe to be the declining institution of marriage.
Paradoxically, during the very same years, vigorous marriage movements have been springing
1. Gans identifies these genres of public sociology: 1) supplying quotes to journalists; 2) writing and speaking to a
general public as clearly as possible; 3) popularizing research on topics of widespread interest; 4) preparing research
reports for the lay public. In addition, I have contributed expert witness testimony, legal affidavits, and research advice
in court cases concerning family rights and policies. Additionally, I helped to found the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-profit organization that engages in public education on family research. See www.contemporaryfamilies.org.
2. Critical theorists provided incisive critiques of the leveling effects of media-sponsored discourse long before the
rise of electronic communications and the simulation society. I emphasize virtuality in media-generated social scientific
representations to underscore the simulacrum-like effect of mass repetitions of social scientific “truths” within globalized media networks (e.g., see Baudrillard 1981).
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1. To engage in public social science in a discursive universe characterized by globalized
media networks that are dominated by corporate conglomerates inevitably is to engage in the realm of what I have elsewhere termed “virtual social science” (cf. Stacey
1996a, 1999). Virtual social science involves the repetition and reification of selective
representations of social science “findings,” often based on misleading statistical claims,
as scientific truth (cf. Stacey 1999).
2. Progressive social scientists and ideologies suffer formidable ideological disadvantages
in this arena, as critical theorists have been discussing for decades (Adorno 1973; Agger
2002; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964). Not only, as Gans points out,
does the centrist (currently neoliberal) orientation of mainstream media gatekeepers
exercise debilitating ideological constraints on the sort of messengers who can gain
access to a wide audience, but also a less obvious disadvantage is more insidious. The
discursive regime of virtual social science imposes conservative epistemological
frameworks on sociological speech that invisibly undermine even overtly critical messages.2 Public sociology in the tradition of C. Wright Mills (1959) aspires to shape a
democratic public sphere. Performing public sociology in the current era, however, as
I will demonstrate, requires engaging in an arena in which social scientific research is
generally transformed into “sound bites” deemed palatable to a mass public.
3. Consequently, even when progressive sociologists gain access to public pulpits and deliver sociological sermons from a critical perspective, the very act of participating risks
reinforcing structures of thought and value antithetical to a critical sociological stance
and to issues of social justice.
The Unwittingly Conservative Effects of Public Sociology
Virtual Objectivity
Under contemporary conditions of mass communication, the movers, shakers, and
makers of public opinion and policy do not merely welcome, but actively seek relevant
research data and analysis from sociologists. However, the operative and slippery word here
is “relevant.” Partisans engaged in public policy controversies deploy social science data selectively on all sides of any issue, as Joyce Iutcovich, the 2002 ASA Congressional Fellow, discovered to her dismay after she observed congressional use of research on the effects of
welfare reform:
Various factions within a debate can garner the “science” to support their respective positions. And
there is sufficient evidence on both sides of the debate to substantiate the various positions. Policymakers will be able to selectively use the evidence that validates their particular set of values.
(2002b:3)
Indeed, this is the case in highly polarized controversies over marriage. Right wing and
neoliberal marriage campaigns aggressively court, sport, and ostentatiously escort a bevy of
social science spin-sters who supply academic legitimacy to their political and religious convictions. Well-funded think tanks like IAV sponsor and disseminate research that appears to
provide scientific grounding for their claims about the personal, social, and economic benefits
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forth adorned in a veritable rainbow of ideological hues. On one band of the spectrum, a
campaign which imperialistically identifies itself as “the Marriage Movement” shares the promarriage bully pulpit with numerous more particular crusades to restore cultural prestige and
institutional privilege to heterosexual conjugality. These range from such right-wing Christian groups as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Marriage Savers, and Promise
Keepers, to the more secular or mainstream religious, neoliberal approaches of the Institute
for American Values (IAV), the National Marriage Project, Smart Marriages, Marriage Matters, the Religion, Culture, and Family Project, and the Communitarians. Collectively, these
groups propagate the pro-marriage ideology—the national doxa on marriage and family—
that currently dominates public policy and bipartisan national rhetoric. Indeed, the Clinton
administration performed crucial spadework for the Bush regime’s full-scale effort to promote marriage rather than welfare as a remedy for poverty.
At the same time, however, one of the more ironic, unpredictable developments in postmodern family politics has been the velocity of an international crusade for same-sex marriage. Few reversals in movement ideology compete with this about-face from the predominant
gay liberation perspective of the Stonewall era. “We expose the institution of marriage as one
of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system,” proclaimed a characteristic grassroots gay liberation broadsheet in 1969 (qtd. in Eskridge 1996:53). Contrast this with the
clean-cut, loving male couple who adorn the July 7, 2003 cover of Newsweek for the magazine’s sympathetic feature story on gay marriage; the caption asks, “Is Gay Marriage Next?”
(“The War Over Gay Marriage” 2003). The Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage in 2001,
Belgium followed suit in 2003, and many neighboring nations in northern and western
Europe are poised to do the same. Same-sex marriage campaigns also are rapidly advancing
even in the more recalcitrant Anglo-dominant societies. Most significant, of course, have
been the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada and the November 2003 ruling
by the Massachusetts state supreme court in favor of same-sex marriage. With civil unions in
Vermont and comprehensive domestic partnership rights in California, the drive for same-sex
marriage rights in the United States has unleashed a substantial backlash.
In short, contemporary visions of marital bliss radiate across a colorful ideological spectrum from lavender to lily white. Hoping to abet the search for the pot of conjugal gold at the
rainbow’s end, each band of marital suitors courts its own retinue of social scientists.
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Ideological Reversals of Fortune
To perform public sociology from a critical perspective, a sociologist immediately learns
that she must agree to play on the home field of an alien team, and by their rules. Public sociologists do not get to frame the questions posed, the issues for which their expertise is sought,
or the format of an admissible response. If offered an invitation to enter the stadium, one’s
only options are to respond or not, and quickly, within the terms of forced-choice questions
and adversarial logics. One week after my article on gay parenthood appeared, a Canadian
lawyer sent me an e-mail with the plaintive subject header “help us?” that confronted me
with such a choice. She wrote to solicit my sociological assistance on behalf of the suits for
same-sex marriage in British Columbia and Ontario.
“We are facing the impact of your recent article,” the lawyer explained, “and of some of
the ‘heterosexual parents have unique strengths’ articles in our cases . . .” (Lahey 2001). The
provincial governments had hired U.S. family sociologist Steven Nock as a paid expert consultant to provide an affidavit discrediting a body of research about the impact of lesbigay
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of heterosexual marriage and the costs of divorce, single motherhood, and sexual and family
diversity (cf. Glenn 1993, 1996; Popenoe and Whitehead 2002; Waite et al. 2002; Waite and
Gallagher 2000). A sophisticated public relations apparatus rapidly spins selected research
findings—published primarily outside the arena of refereed scholarship—into potent sound
bites to transmit to a mass audience through diverse communications technologies. This
enterprise has been so successful that, as indicated above, pro-marriage ideology now governs official discourse and policy about the causes and consequences of poverty. This socially
constructed “common sense” fuels initiatives for covenant marriage, divorce restrictions, welfare reform, marriage education, and, somewhat inconsistently, a rash of statewide measures
designed to foreclose the possibility of extending the reputed benefits of marriage to same-sex
couples.
Of course, efforts to preclude same-sex marriage signal widespread cultural awareness
that lesbian and gay couples have themselves become among the most avid of contemporary
marital suitors. Needing to sue, quite literally, in courts of law and public opinion for the right
to marry compels the gay marriage movement to woo a stock of spin-sters as well. As one
grassroots activist with the United for the Freedom to Marry, Inc. campaign in New York
acknowledged: “We are developing a roster of ‘poster couples’ who are willing to be interviewed by reporters about their desire to be legally married. We search for the winning media
‘spin’ on this issue” (Javors 2001:299).
Along with poster couples, the same-sex marriage movement also seeks social scientists
who can counter research claims made by conservative marriage campaigns that the benefits
of marriage apply only to heterosexual couples and their families, or that extending the right
to marry to same-sex couples threatens to undermine marriage as an institution. Although
the majority of legal and public opinion in the United States still resists these challenges (cf.
Polikoff 2002), the same-sex marriage movement too has achieved historic political, judicial,
and cultural victories. After an Ontario Divisional Court unanimously ruled in favor of the
plaintiffs that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates the Canadian constitution
(Halpern v. Canada 2001a), the Canadian national government accepted gay marriage in June
2003, opening the door for gay and lesbian couples from the United States to join Canadians
in legalizing their unions.
Since the publication in 2001 of an article I co-authored about research on the effects of
lesbigay parenthood (Stacey and Biblarz 2001), I have become one of the social science spinsters courted by gay marital and parent rights suitors as well as by the mainstream media to
perform family sociology in transnational media and court cases. In the process, I have lost
some of the innocence I once sustained about the progressive potential of public sociology.
The Unwittingly Conservative Effects of Public Sociology
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parents on children that plaintiffs’ experts had used to support their suit for same-sex marriage. In his affidavit, Nock provided what the gay rights lawyers feared were devastating critiques of the validity and methodologies of the research studies. “Not a single one of those
studies,” Nock’s affidavit asserted, “was conducted according to general accepted standards of
scientific research.” More damaging was his claim that “all of the articles I reviewed contained at least one fatal flaw of design or execution” (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001b). Moreover, Nock’s affidavit cited my co-authored article on lesbigay parenthood in support of his
critique. Hence, the plaintiffs’ attorneys petitioned me to enter the case.
“Federal experts are claiming that we just don’t know what this would unleash on the
world,” the Canadian lawyer’s message explained, “and it could be monumentally destructive
in unanticipated ways. Our actual case simply consists of trying to show that there is such a
functional similarity between the different types of families, and we have gone out on a limb
and claimed that in social science research, there is no evidence of any ‘harm’ that would
impact on children whose lesbian or gay parents were permitted to marry.” She beseeched
me to file a reply affidavit “summarizing your own view of the relevance of your research to
the question of whether lesbigay parents do anything as couples or as parents that would
make marriage rights inappropriate for them” (Lahey 2001).
Note the forced-choice, reductionist character of the questions I was being invited to
address: is there a “functional similarity” between gay and straight couples and their families?
Would extending the right to marry to same-sex couples erode the institution? Would it
inflict harm on children? Would same-sex couples and their children derive the same benefits
from marriage that the government and its social scientists maintain the institution bestows
on heterosexual couples? This prefabricated frame precludes from consideration debates
about the social consequences of enhancing or diminishing the privileged status of marriage
as an institution. It literally rules out of court concerted efforts by feminists, gay liberationists,
and others to expand state recognition of personal relationships to encompass the diverse
family forms contemporary citizens actually inhabit. Simply by entering this arena of public
sociology, one tacitly stipulates to the contentious premise that the state should continue to
favor married couples and their children over all other forms of intimacy. In other words, the
options are to weigh in on the side of the “assimilationist strategy” pursued by mainstream
gay rights organizations, or not to speak at all.
As a feminist scholar with a carefully developed critical perspective on family-values discourse, I confronted paradoxical challenges here. For several decades, I have published research
and analyses of family transformations that attempt to decenter what Dorothy Smith (1993)
has labeled SNAF—the standard North-American family. Moreover, during the past decade, I
have actively engaged in public sociology activities that challenged the research claims disseminated by the pro-marriage movement and by family-values discourses in the United States,
Canada, and the United Kingdom. My work emphasizes social structural and historical over
individual and moral causes and consequences of the decline of SNAF. It outlines democratic
opportunities as well as costs in the erosion of the modern marriage system and the patriarchal
bargain (Kandiyoti 1988)—through which women exchange economic dependency for domestic service and deference—that sustained it. Moreover, my work has identified ways in which
marriage serves simultaneously as a vehicle and a sign of structural privilege and inequality—
an institution with codes of access to benefits and burdens that do not meet “equal opportunity
employer” standards. Rather, I have argued that, historically, marriage as an institution reinforces privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social classes and races, by men and heterosexuals, as well as those that couples receive compared with single adults and members of other
household and kinship forms (cf. Stacey 1993, 1994a, 1996a, 1996b, 1998, 2001).
These inequities are particularly severe in the United States, where the welfare state and
public support of families never attained the level of development or legitimacy it did in most
other Western nations, and where neoconservative assaults on public provision have been
most effective and extreme. In fact, the pro-marriage movement in the United States has
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value participation in the institution as a fundamental personal choice, a means to provide security
to their children, an occasion for state, community and familial support, and a celebration of a life
commitment to the relationship. The Applicant Couples wish to partake in this essentially human
expression of enduring love for their spouse, in furtherance of all of the positive purposes of marriage. (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001d, Para. 10)
In his capacity as expert witness for the government, Nock argued that there was no evidentiary basis for presuming that same-sex couples and their children would accrue the same
benefits from marriage that he has argued heterosexual married-couple families enjoy. Our
reply affidavit, therefore, delineated inconsistencies in Nock’s analyses of research on the
benefits of marriage:
Paradoxically, Professor Nock has written extensively on the benefits of marriage to adults, children
and to society as a whole. . . . However, in his affidavit, Professor Nock claims that it is purely specula3. Although Nock’s affidavit does not state that he is personally opposed to (or in favor of) legalizing same-sex
marriage, it cautions against taking legislative or judicial action before what he considers to be adequate research is conducted on the effects it might have on children: “Given the potential consequences of an incorrect conclusion, such
research seems warranted before any body, legislatures or courts, come to any conclusion about domestic arrangements
with unknown consequences for children” (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001b). I interpret this stance and Nock’s paid contributions to the Canadian Justice Department more generally as weighing in on the side of the Canadian government’s
case against extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.
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mobilized bipartisan support for promoting marriage rather than welfare as a remedy for poverty. To this end, it sponsors and publicizes research by its own social science spin-sters, such
as Linda Waite, Norval Glenn, as well as Nock, who tout economic, psychological, social,
physical, and spiritual advantages of marriage to spouses, their children, and their nation
(Glenn 1993; Nock 1998; Waite et al. 2002; Waite and Gallagher 2000). Efforts to extend
marriage rights to same-sex couples posit and fortify this celebratory view of marriage with
which my own work takes issue. In place of this assimilationist strategy, I would advocate a
“3D” family politics agenda—support for a regime of family Democracy and Diversity and for
Disestablishing a hierarchy of advantaged family structures. In my view, the substance of
family relationships matters far more than their form, and we should promote wide access to
the basic 3Rs of family success—Respect, Recognition, and Resources. Accordingly, my prior
public sociology activities advocated resistance rather than assimilation to the one-size-fits-all
doctrine of the pro-marriage movement.
At the same time, however, I believe that the exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage reproduces a host of gender and sexual injustices. More basically, my commitment to
civil liberties and equity renders a heterosexual monopoly on marriage (or any other institution) indefensible. Further, I recognize that a majority of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
people desire the potent symbolic affirmation that the right to marry conveys perhaps as
much as they seek its substantial practical advantages (Cruz 2001). Consequently, the appeal
from the Canadian same-sex marriage suitors confronted me with a prickly political quandary.
By accepting the invitation to submit a reply affidavit to Nock’s critical analysis of the
research on lesbian and gay parenting, I agreed to an ironic reversal in our customary stances in
debates about marriage. Nock directs the Marriage Matters Program at the University of Virginia,
is a signatory to the “Statement of Principles” issued by the Marriage Movement in June of 2000,
conducts sympathetic research on covenant marriage in Louisiana, and writes and speaks widely
in the public domain on behalf of marriage. However, serving as consultant for the Canadian
provincial governments, Nock provided an affidavit that cautioned against extending such benefits to same-sex couples at this point in time, while I deployed my social scientific authority on
behalf of rather sentimental, occasionally starry-eyed, same-sex marital suitors.3
“The Applicant Couples recognize, respect and support the myriad of positive goods that
marriage, and uniquely marriage, provides,” proclaimed the legal “factum” that the same-sex
plaintiffs submitted to the court. “The Couples,” the legal brief continued,
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tive to infer that any of these benefits would be likely to apply to same-sex parents and their children. His argument that the benefits of access to a “healthy, happy intact family” structure might
not apply to same-sex parents and their children is inconsistent, illogical and unreasonable. (Halpern et. al. v. Canada 2001d, Para. 121)
Because the framing of the issues in the case precluded offering criticisms of marriage as
an institution, I had to develop an argument that might appear inconsistent with former analyses of my own:
Professor Nock and other researchers find that marriage serves to stabilize couple relationships,
attracts social recognition of and investment in the continuity of the relationship, contributes to
financial well-being, individual happiness, improved levels of physical and mental health, job satisfaction and achievement, to higher rates of involvement with extended family members, and lower
rates of domestic violence than are found in cohabiting partnerships (e.g., Waite and Gallagher
2000). (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001d)
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted
from the past. (Qtd. in Feuer, 1969, p.360)
Lacking control over the questions we are asked to address or the discursive frames through
which our responses will be filtered, we risk eliciting the sort of unanticipated, and undesired,
consequences that post-9/11 commentators termed “blowback” effects.
Performing Positivist Sociology
Discursive constraints on practitioners of public sociology extend beyond the nature of
the questions posed and the substance of admissible responses to the realm of methodology and
epistemology. Virtual social science discourse is irredeemably positivist.4 Public interlocutors—
4. Positivism tends to freeze all of history in current findings and leads to the assumption that social relations are
controlled by universal “laws” made visible by statistics (see Seidman 1994).
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Note the legalistic semantic strategy I employed in citing claims that Nock and Waite have
made about the advantages of marriage. I omitted mentioning the contentious nature of
these claims or critiques of their analyses that I and many other scholars have made (cf
Coontz 1997; Cowan 1993; Skolnick 1991; Stacey 1994a, 1994b).
Our adversarial locations in the Canadian same-sex marriage suits yielded an additional
ironic reversal in positions to which Nock and I generally adhere. The central thrust of my coauthored article on the impact of parental sexual orientation on children (Stacey and Biblarz
2001) was to challenge prior defensive claims by researchers that there are “no differences”
between children reared by heterosexual and homosexual parents. Our article argued instead
that differences are not deficits and that theory and preliminary data alike suggest that parental sexual orientation elicits some intriguing differences in parental relationships and child
development. However, countering Nock as public sociologist in the same-sex marriage suits
led me to emphasize similarity rather than difference. Nock, on the other hand, employed an
implicit “difference” perspective to caution against legalizing same-sex marriage: “while it is
generally true that marriage confers numerous advantages, it is unknown whether those
advantages are the result of marriage, per se, or heterosexual marriage” (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001d, Para. 122). In contrast, by claiming that same-sex couples and their children
would indeed reap the same benefits from marriage, I implicitly undermined my commitment to investigating and affirming social differences.
In short, the terms governing public sociology underscore Marx’s famous dictum about
the circumstances under which people make history:
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be they lawyers, journalists, politicians, or citizens—demand that sociologists tell them the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They subscribe to a positivist belief that
social scientific truth is singular, transparent, measurable, and objective. In contrast, I practice
a reflexive theory and method rooted in the belief that knowledge about social reality is inescapably partial, perspectival, interpretive, historical, and discursively constructed. I would
endorse the response of the, perhaps apocryphal, Cree witness in a much earlier Canadian
court case who, according to James Clifford, faltered when administered the oath, “I’m not
sure I can tell the truth . . . I can only tell what I know” (Clifford 1986:8). Yet, in a further
irony, the Canadian cases positioned me, a qualitative sociologist, to defend the scientific
validity of primarily positivist studies of child development “outcomes” against Nock’s quantitative methodological objections, and to challenge the adequacy of his critique while defending the authority of my research analysis in positivist terms.
A particularly theatrical moment of epistemological dissonance ensued when the Attorney General (AG) of Ontario cross-examined me, a qualitative sociologist, on the topic of
meta-analysis—a highly technical and sometimes controversial form of statistical analysis.
First she produced a reference volume and asked me to confirm its authority:
Appearing nonplused by my response, the Attorney General proceeded nonetheless to quote
the encyclopedia’s entry on meta-analysis in an effort to undermine the scientific authority of
my analysis of the research on lesbian and gay parenting:
AG: —and I would like to know whether you agree with this definition. Meta-analysis is the practice of statistically summarizing empirical findings from different studies reaching generalizations about the results?
JS: Correct. It’s actually very technical but—
AG: Right. And so the point of a proper meta-analysis is to be able to generalize from results of individual studies that would not be safe to generalize from on their own?
JS: That is the goal of meta-analysis.
AG: And I assume that you’d agree that over time that there have been rigours and statistical standards and methodologies that have been developed to do meta-analysis?
JS: Correct.
AG: Is it fair to say that the type of study that you did as exhibit C to your affidavit would generally
be classified as a narrative review of the twenty-one studies to be examined rather than the
technical meta-analysis?
The Attorney General’s strategy, it soon became clear, was to suggest that our article,
along with the research it analysed, was insufficiently scientific to serve as evidence for
public policymakers.
AG: And in the last paragraph just before the new section “Common Problems With Narrative
Reviews”—
JS: Mm-hmm.
AG: —the authors of this encyclopaedia say that, “Although narrative reviewing has often proved
useful”—
JS: Mm-hmm.
AG: —“the method has often proved to be inadequate for reaching definitive conclusions about the
degree of empirical support for a phenomenon or for a theory about the phenomenon.” And
would you agree with that statement? (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001c)
The chief counsel for the plaintiffs objected at this point, leading us to perform an intricate
pas de trois negotiating the character of admissible questions and responses on the subject of
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AG: Now, I have a copy of a reference from the Encyclopedia of Sociology and I’m wondering whether
you can tell me if this is considered an authoritative source within the field of sociology and
whether you’re familiar with that?
JS: I’m not familiar with it at all.
AG: And so you’ve never seen this?
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sociological method. The Attorney General translated my attempt to express a critical perspective on social science objectivity as support for the encyclopedia’s positivist standard of
truth:
JS: Yes, well, sure. I mean that narrative—I mean are you just saying what I said before, that I
don’t believe that any social science is absolutely—
AG: Definitive?
JS: Objective or definitive ever, or else we would close up shop. We wouldn’t have to keep doing it.
AG: So in general you would agree with this statement [that our “narrative” analysis was neither
objective nor definitive]? (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001c)
AG: And, in fact, I think you told the host when he gave you a hypothetical that because of this
danger that if you found results in your own research that you thought could only be used to
do harm, as you might define harm, that you might not want to publish them?
JS: That’s certainly correct but I also made a point of stressing that I couldn’t imagine ever being in
that situation, that I was being forced to respond on a radio program to a hypothetical that has
nothing whatsoever to do with the way I do research or conduct research or would formulate a
project. That it was almost inconceivable to me that that could ever happen, but thinking of
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The Attorney General’s mission was to challenge the validity of a cumulative research
body of small-scale studies on lesbian and gay parenthood that reported no empirical grounds
for denying parenting rights to same-sex couples. Paraphrasing Nock, she argued that this
research was insufficiently scientific to justify granting such rights. Only large-scale studies
conducted by “objective” researchers employing random sampling techniques would qualify
as adequate scientific evidence. I suspect that many, if not most, American sociologists agree
with this scientific standard. At the same time, I would wager that a majority of sociologists
also support legalizing same-sex marriage, unaware of underlying tension between their
political and epistemological leanings.
The tension, however, is weighty. Whereas most sociologists subscribe to liberal social
and political values, positivist discourse, as critical theorists and sociologists have argued,
encodes a more conservative social philosophy, irrespective of specific empirical findings or
authorial intent (see, for example, Adorno 1973; Agger 2000, 2002; Marcuse 1964; Mills
1959). Ben Agger (2000) defines sociological positivist discourse “as the efforts of the sociologistauthor to create the impression that her written work reflects a world out there and is not a
literary product” (p. 28). “As positivist discourse,” Agger argues, “sociology plays a powerfully
ideological role, purporting to represent the frozen world without introducing theoretical
perspective or politics and best, by way of its ‘de-authorization,’ hardening that world into
our seeming social fate, captured in statements of law” (p. 22). By suppressing awareness
that no study or text writes itself, “sociology secretly argues for the world it captures representationally, the world governed by intractable patterns, approaching iron laws . . .” (p.
242). Positivist discourse pretends that research questions and findings are value-free, that
“problems in the social sciences are technical ones, soluble by more careful attention to science’s inner workings” (Halfpenny 2001:375). However, “the pretense of disinterestedness,
of value-freedom,” Agger aptly observes, “is the most impregnable value position of all”
(2000:32).
This pretense permeates public sociological discourse, even in most ostensibly liberal arenas. The week before my cross-examination in the Ontario same-sex marriage case, Nock and
I both had participated in an hour-long National Public Radio (NPR) program discussing the
politics of social science. The host had questioned me about how my political sympathies for
gay rights affected my analysis of the research and then challenged me with a thorny hypothetical: What would I do if I conducted research that yielded findings that could be harmful?
Globalized communications technologies enabled the Ontario Attorney General to employ a
transcript of the radio program when she cross-examined me the very next week. She did so
in order to undermine my credibility as an objective social scientist:
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death camps and Hitler and science like that and having that background I could imagine coming up with results from a study that could be abused and misused and deciding the dangers
were too great to want to publish it. Not that I would lie about it—
AG: Right.
JS: —but that I do not want to do evil in the world. (Halpern et al. v. Canada 2001c)
Leaving aside the complex questions about professional and moral ethics at issue in this
exchange, I wish to underscore the epistemological paradox it reveals. Although the arena of
public sociology presumes and represents knowledge to be positivist, to perform in it effectively demands reflexive and deconstructive forms of knowledge and skill. Familiarity with
reader reception theory, rhetoric, semiotics, and even performance studies offers better preparation for the work of expert witness, policy consultant, call-in radio program guest, TV talking head, print interviewee, op-ed and letter-to-the-editor writer than does expertise in the
pertinent body of empirical sociological research. The supreme irony here is that the domain
of public sociology compels one to deploy these reflexive skills and knowledge in the service
of constructing a verisimilitude of positivist truth.
Performing public sociology in the world of mass media only exacerbates these difficulties, for here, as McLuhan (1967) long ago pointed out, the medium indeed is the message. In
the realm of the sound bite, the subtextual message is implicitly conservative, irrespective of
its manifest content or a speaker’s intent. Volatile, competitive market forces drive profitseeking, globalized media conglomerates to attract audiences with controversy, infotainment,
and spectacle (cf. Gamson 1998). “A sound bite society,” as journalist and critic Jeffrey Scheuer
(2001) argues,
in which slogans and images supplant arguments and ideas, favors certain kinds of claims and
values and certain modes of communication. Thus, for example, unmediated public discourse with
its potential to challenge and analyze—the paradigmatic democratic activity since the time of the
Greeks—is dismissed as “talking heads.” Instead we have the politics of zingers. (P. 82)
The very structure of televisual reality, particularly commercial TV, depends upon what
Scheuer aptly terms “emotional tabloidism.” Pitching to emotions rather than reflection, the
medium traffics in appearances, surfaces, and symbolism and blurs distinctions between
images and substance: “TV likes action and dislikes thought. It favors conflict and spectacle
and disfavors ambiguity, irony, and analytic or abstract thinking; loves violence and detests
rational argument” (Scheuer 2001:85). With political implications akin to those of positivist
epistemology, television depends upon simplification and projects an illusory transparency of
reality. Televisual social science conventionally constructs an intellectual universe composed
of reductionist, polarized debates in which truth is presumed to lie midway between two
“extremes”: divorce does or does not harm children; abortion is or is not murder; same-sex
marriage will or will not erode Western civilization. Joshua Gamson (1998), in his exceptionally nuanced analysis of representations of sexual and gender nonconformity on daytime,
participatory TV talk shows, demonstrates how “performance and dishonesty are built into
the production arrangements of television talk; they result from its logic, not from its corruption” (p. 89). Similar production arrangements structure the representation of televisual
social science within the evening news magazine and infotainment genres.
In July 2001, I naively agreed to a live-broadcast appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a
confrontational, reactionary infotainment program on the Fox network. While I sat alone
staring into a camera in a Los Angeles studio, a satellite hook-up relayed O’Reilly’s disembodied
voice from across the continent. O’Reilly fired leading questions at me crafted to elicit two
desired sound bites—that gay parents produce gay children and that liberal scholars, constrained
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by “PC” dogma, have suppressed this finding. When I balked at this script and attempted to
correct O’Reilly’s distorted interpretations of my published views, he abruptly terminated the
interview, and my microphone went dead. In this instance, I was literally “silenced” for refusing to provide the virtual social science data that supported O’Reilly’s a priori views. The live
broadcast format protected me, however, from the more insidious risks that pre-recorded
interviews with scholars pose. The latter enable producers literally to select from lengthy videotapes whichever minuscule (sight-and-) sound-bites of sociology they believe will best
advance the narrative line of the program that they wish to reinforce.
Sound-bite social science cannot accommodate complexity, nuance, ambiguity, or uncertainty—the fundamental features of critical reason and intellectual inquiry. Consequently,
here again, conservatives enjoy a paradoxical advantage. Although conservative ideologies
serve the interests of economic and political elites, they do so by over-simplifying, demonizing, and individualizing social issues. In other words, conservatives employ demagogic populist
discourse to elitist ends. Paradoxically, as Scheuer points out, the reverse is true of progressive
politics. Despite the more democratic aspirations of critical ideologies, the often counterintuitive social structural analyses that undergird them demand from audiences comparatively sophisticated, “elitist” intellectual skills. Perhaps the simultaneous escalation of televisual politics and a right wing ideological shift is more than coincidental. “The ultimate irony,”
a Times Mirror report observes, is that “The Information Age has spawned such an uninformed and uninvolved population” (qtd. in Scheuer 2001:84).
Conditions for public sociology on radio venues represent variations on these themes—
both better and worse. To be sure, radio programming offers greater time, space, and access to
critical analyses and to popular participation. Typically, however, the level of complexity and
reflexivity allowed inversely relates to the size and impact of the audience addressed.
Listener-sponsored public and community radio stations provide the most expansive, sophisticated, and considered podiums for public sociology. However, here one generally preaches
to a small choir from texts that risk distorted dissemination to more hostile congregations, as
happened when the Ontario Attorney General cross-examined me over excerpts from the
radio transcript of the Boston NPR program. Commercial AM radio talk shows, on the other
hand, can reach substantial, heterogeneous audiences, and, depending upon how much control the host exerts, they can allow for occasional moments of genuinely engaged intellectual
exchanges. However, governed by the same profit-seeking production constraints as TV, most
commercial radio talk shows also resort to emotional tabloidism. They typically require social
scientists to perform a polarized food fight staged between experts with opposing views, or
not infrequently the host plays “get the guest.” Perhaps, this is why conservative, demagogic,
and/or abusive personalities, such as Rush Limbaugh, anchor these much more frequently
than do progressive, democratic, and thoughtful hosts.
Print media provide the most frequent and diverse opportunities to engage in public
sociology. Entrepreneurial critical scholars able to write accessible, engaging prose can compete to popularize their research in op-eds, letters to the editor, syndicated columns, and feature stories in a broad array of mainstream and more dissident newspapers and periodicals.
Of course, the more influential the periodical, the less favorable the prospects; acceptance
rates for unsolicited submissions to prominent national newspapers and magazines fall precipitously below those of the most selective academic journals. Consequently, telephone
interviews by reporters, columnists, and commissioned feature writers represent a sociologist’s most frequent, but also most constrained, access to the public. Typically, a journalist, up
against an imminent deadline, seeks background information and perhaps a brief quotation
from an “expert” on a story tangential to one’s research.
In rare instances, however, the journalist’s assignment is to report on a sociological study
itself. Even such coveted invitations for one’s work to reach a broad public audience do not
shield you from the dangerous dictates of sound-bite sociology. After all, to be newsworthy,
social science research must say something provocatively new. News stories need a “hook,”
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and no scholar gets to control the spin by which her work is represented. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, most of the print stories reporting about our study featured the controversial issues
of gender and sexual differences. Typical and influential in this regard, a Reuter’s wire service
story, published days after our article appeared, led by overstating our analysis of gender nonconformity and of the defensive way in which prior researchers had reported such findings:
USC sociologists Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz examined 21 studies on the subject [of the
effects of parental sexual orientation] dating back to 1980 and found that children of lesbians and
gays are more likely to depart from traditional gender roles than children of heterosexual couples.
In an interview on Friday, Biblarz said that the study found that information on the subject had previously been stifled and the differences played down. (Tippit 2001)
More Likely To Be Killed by a Terrorist?
Seduced by marital suitors to participate in polarized public discourses on the changing
character of marriage and family life, I have learned to temper my innocently romantic expectations about the progressive potential of public sociology. Paradoxes of the enterprise proliferate, as I have demonstrated. Contradictory principles and pressures induce me to deploy the
rhetoric and data of positivist research in the service of assimilationist same-sex marriage
campaigns that ignore many of the feminist, queer, and progressive critiques of the institution—critiques to which I personally subscribe. Moreover, under contemporary conditions of
globalized, market-driven communications technologies and neoconservative discursive
frames, to engage in public sociology is to reinforce positivist hegemony, whatever your epistemological convictions. Virtual social science exploits semiotic and deconstructive knowledge to convey research in rhetoric that reinforces the very positivist, normalizing ideological
regime the former seek to expose.
Seeking to liberate the discipline of sociology from the juggernaut of positivist discourse
and to promote progressive public sociology, Agger (2000) advocates a self-reflexive strategy
that displays its narrativity:
The first step in the transformation of our discipline is to realize that sociology is writing, embracing
narrativity—the writer’s presence. Only by recognizing this can we recognize that sociology authors
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“Stifled,” however, was the reporter’s term, not Biblarz’, and our article did not claim
that the children ARE more likely to depart from or conform to anything; only that there
were good theoretical reasons to expect this and that a few studies reported findings in this
direction. It seems likely that Reuter’s comparatively sober print formulation of the two
sound-bites that O’Reilly failed to elicit from me during my brief appearance on his program
actually generated my invitation to appear there in the first place.
Likewise, the Reuter’s story and a similar one that appeared in the Los Angeles Times
(Boxall 2001) generated an array of derivative print treatments across the ideological spectrum. Curiously enough, The Advocate, the prominent national gay and lesbian news magazine,
printed one of the more peculiar and irresponsible representations of our study. Without
bothering to interview Biblarz or me, nor, it appears, to read our article, The Advocate produced an alarmist report (Graham 2001). “Is it nurture over nature?” queried the perplexing
boldface title, apparently affixed by an editor unaware that our article had taken no position
on the timeworn nature/nurture debate, nor formulated the issues at stake in such terms.
After repeating the overstated claims about the incidence of gender and sexual nonconformity among children with lesbian and gay parents, the article worried that “such studies may
have a noticeable impact on adoption, especially in states where a parent’s sexual orientation
can determine custody rights.” To underscore this threat, it concluded by identifying a recent
negative custody decision for same-sex parents by a New Jersey court.
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a world that is susceptible to different versions, especially non-positivist versions allowing for fundamental change. (P. 246)
The bulk of your talk (it seemed to me) was a relentlessly pessimistic analysis of the futility of serious scholars getting the opportunity for a true hearing when dealing with media journalists; the
frames (imposed by others) just don’t permit much more than sound bites. Yet at the very end of
your talk you turn around (in order to avoid ending on a downer) and finish on an upbeat note
which (it seemed to me) contradicted the brilliance of the previous analysis. Why? You weren’t
talking to an interviewer. Why the need to end sunny when the rest was so dark? (Berger 2002)
Berger’s penetrating question merits a more convincing answer than I feel equipped to
supply. I would not deny the impact of oratorical conventions on my attempt to conclude a
dispiriting lecture on a less downcast beat. Nor would I reject the possibility that my last-minute
turn-about reflects anything more than a Gramscian determination to resist “pessimism of the
intellect” with “optimism of the will.” Nonetheless, I also can point to more heartening, if aberrant, episodes in my courtship experiences with public sociology. After all, communications
media and public forums are not monolithic (cf. Gamson 1998; Poster 2001), and critical
voices can and do penetrate crevices in the virtual ideological shield. “For every horror story”
about talk TV, Gamson (1998) discovered that “there seems to be a happy one, in which a
guest reports an experience of breaking through, of saying what she wanted to say, of
‘enlightening’ or of representing a life approximating the one she recognizes as her own” (p.
91). I can say the same about my experiences performing public sociology in diverse media
about research on gay and lesbian family research.
To my surprise and satisfaction, the most dramatic departure from the sound-bite treatment of our gay parenting study proved also to be the most influential. “A Rainbow of Differences in Gays’ Children,” announced a serious and nuanced story in the Science section of
the New York Times by a reporter endowed with sufficient lead time, resources, responsibility
and skills to read and discuss the research with me in some depth (Goode 2001). Because of
the prestige and influence of the venue, this story initiated a second, even broader round
of public notice and courtship by international media, community organizations, social services, and legal rights and advocacy projects. Soon I found myself discussing research regularly with journalists and with social and legal activists pursuing same-sex marriage, gay
adoption and “second-parent” adoption rights in the courts of public opinion as well as law.
Although there have been notable set-backs and losses in the global drive to secure equal
family rights for individuals of all sexual orientations and identities (see, for example, Polikoff
2002), the gains and historical momentum are far more impressive. Poll data, legislation, and
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“Good sociological writing, or public sociology,” in Agger’s view, “admits that it tells a story,
invites other stories and addresses important public issues” (257). While I share Agger’s belief
that “good sociology is unashamed of its advocacy,” few gatekeepers, interlocutors, or constituencies for public sociology countenance such a stance. Instead, they demand the pretense of
positivist detachment. To be sure, public forums have no patience with abstract, jargon-studded
academic locutions, but positivism scarcely holds a monopoly on such prose. Unreflexive,
plainspoken positivist discourse is the prerequisite lingua franca for entry into a realm that
misreads signs of subjectivity, let alone advocacy, as evidence of unprofessional, ideological
“bias.” Recall my ineffective self-reflexive response to the “hypothetical” dilemma about how
I would interpret unwelcome research findings that the NPR radio host posed, and the
Ontario Attorney General soon exploited.
Nonetheless, it would be disingenuous, as well as nihilistic, were I to supplant my former
overly optimistic view of public sociology with an excessively pessimistic cynicism. Despite
my disillusionment and the sobering political implications of my analysis of public sociology, I
have not concluded (as Adorno and other Frankfurt theorists did) that participation is futile
or worse. Perhaps refusing such a conclusion represents a failure of intellectual courage, as
Bennett Berger hints in his generous response to an oral version of this article:
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judicial decisions throughout most post-industrial societies and elsewhere document what
seems an irreversible trajectory. If, how, and how much public sociological performances by
social science spin-sters like myself can contribute to this historic process is as impossible to
measure as it may be self-serving to presume.
Having been too frequently seduced and abandoned, stood up, manipulated, and misunderstood by public suitors, I find myself a more jaded, wary social science spin-ster. I am
learning to screen the character and credentials of my companions with greater care, to select
reasonably safe public venues in which to meet, to negotiate the terms and limits of our
encounters, and to temper my expectations about the prospects for success. Yet, if I have
learned to adopt an ambivalent posture toward my public sociology prospects, nonetheless,
when courted with sensitivity, I dare to continue to spin.
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