Since 2004, 16 states have legalized gay marriage. While gay rights activists recognize this as a victory of sorts, College of Charleston Professor of Communication Leigh Moscowitz contends it’s only one of many equality issues activists hoped to push into the public eye. In her new book, The Battle over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism through the Media, Moscowitz examines the mainstream media’s effect on marriage equality and the gay rights movement.
“I have always been interested in how the mainstream media affects social change,” Moscowitz said. “I started studying this in 2004. I looked back at media coverage that had led up to the election. It seemed like gay marriage had become this central issue overnight, so I traveled to see activists and I discovered that gay marriage is not what activists wanted the media to focus on but it’s all the media would focus on. When they tried to talk about other issues, the media would always bring it back to marriage.”
Moscowitz’s book focuses on both the path to centralizing gay marriage and the consequences of neglecting other issues in favor of marriage. “I critique marriage as an institution as the end of the road for all civil rights – there are a lot of people who are still left out after gay marriage is recognized.”
Specifically, issues of adoption rights, housing availability and job security, among others, were excluded from major conversations regarding gay rights once marriage equality became the dominant focus of the mainstream media.
The Battle over Marriage was recently reviewed in The Atlantic magazine, which wrote, “The LGBT community’s public relations successes have created some problems as well. In particular, the push for gay marriage has drawn attention away from other issues. For example, lesbian and gay people can still be fired for their sexual orientation in 24 states; transgender people can be fired in 44.”
Moscowitz will teach Media in the Digital Age and Gender and the Media during the Spring 2014 term at the College. She plans to revisit media coverage of gay rights issues for further scholarship in the future.