I've been frustrated with NPR on exactly this problem for years. The "issue" of gay rights and, more recently, gay marriage, springs to mind. They were running a series for a while last year that alternated days where one day there would be a pro-gay marriage speaker, and the next day an anti-, and so on. The time I heard it, it was Margaret Cho (pro) and then someone from the Heritage Institute (anti). Quite apart from the assymetry of these choices (!) what gets me is that they present this arrangement as a way of being neutral about something, when it in fact entirely evacuates substance from the arguments, reifying and abstracting the debate into a question of consumer choice -- gay marriage -- "do you buy it, or not"? Are you compelled, or are you left cold? As Sedgwick says, only the extremes of compulsion and voluntarity remain, and "the middle ranges of agency" in one's relation to any given issue get completely erased. There's no room to say: gay marriage? I kinda sorta buy it. (Because I believe instead in the possibilitiy of creating alternative social arrangements, and in changing the role of the state in regulating and sanctioning one's emotional and interpersonal life). But you can't "kinda" consume anything...

KB
Anonymous | 09.07.04 - 10:50 am | #

Yeah. I was talking last night with some people in my antiwar group about the fact that religious groups that favor gay marriage, or that have complex views on it (or anyone who's ambivalent about it from precisely the point of view you suggest) are never the ones whose representatives get invited to be on those talk shows. My neighbor pointed out that a group of progressive clergy had a big press conference in Chicago recently to voice their support for gay marriage and they received hardly any media coverage at all.

I once overheard a former colleague of ours, who shall remain nameless, asking a senior colleague for suggestions for a reading containing a well-reasoned, judicious argument in favor of anti-sodomy laws, so as to balance out the pro-gay rights reading he was teaching. From the context it was clear he was not in favor of such laws, but he was incredibly cavalier about the need for "balance" on the issue...
Anonymous | 09.07.04 - 10:50 am | #