Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Using data from the 1988 General Social Survey, this paper explores the relationship between religious affiliation and tolerance toward homosexuals. More specifically, this study investigates the effect of (1) certain Conservative Protestant beliefs, (2) perceived threat of individuals engaging “immoral” behavior (3) belief that morality is a personal, rather than societal matter, and (4) target group affect in relation to granting of civil liberties to homosexuals (i.e., tolerance). Findings indicate much of the relationship between conservative religious affiliation and tolerance toward homosexuals is explained by the combination of church attendance, Biblical literalism and target group affect. In addition, those who believe an individual is capable of corrupting society are more likely to withhold civil liberties, despite controls for the morality of homosexuality (target group affect), Biblical literalism, church attendance and religious affiliation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Relationships between attitudes toward traditional gender roles for women and attitudes toward support for the civil liberties of homosexuals are explored across five religious denominational groupings using GSS data from 1996. Structural equation modeling is used to estimate the relationships. Discusses potential sources of difference between religious traditions regarding the above issues and theorizes a connection between traditional family values (including the roles played by women) and negative attitudes toward homosexual family formation and homosexuals’ civil liberties. Relative to evangelical Protestants, Black Protestants, Mainline Protestants and those unaffiliated with a religion were more likely to report support for homosexuals’ civil liberties. Catholics did not differ from Evangelicals regarding civil liberties for gays and lesbians. Mainline Protestants and the unaffiliated were less likely than Evangelicals to adhere to traditional attitudes toward women’s gender roles. Significant indirect effects of religiously informed gender attitudes were also found for these two groups. Black Protestants and Catholics did not differ from Evangelicals when indirect effects of gender attitudes were calculated.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper builds in two ways on earlier studies that have examined “the cost of being homosexual,” both by using data from the 2000 Census and by employing multilevel analyses. In doing so, we have uncovered results that stand in sharp contrast to many of the previous findings about the relationships between sexual orientation and income, and the role that contextual variables play in influencing these relationships. Further, our findings emphasize that the cost of being a gay man differs greatly from that of being a lesbian, and that gender plays an important role in determining the manner in which contextual variables influence the relationship between sexual orientation and income.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Lifetime Original The Truth About Jane is a highly rated, award-winning telefilm and one of the first U.S. TV movies concerning teen lesbianism. It presents what seems to be a healthy, normative understanding of adolescence, in line with broader, liberal parental discourses of youth homosexuality. I argue, however, that this narrative is complicated because it risks fixing lesbian and gay sexual identity in essentialist terms, something that may serve an ultimate purpose of assuring straight parents that gay and lesbian children will grow up no different than other children. The identity work of the title character, Jane, and her mother, Janice, is examined using Foucault’s understanding of confession as a ritual of discourse, which provides the means of producing the truth of one’s sexuality and reducing guilt but is always constrained by being compelled and adjudicated, in this case by a straight viewer. The analysis also focuses on key extratextual elements of the film’s production and reception, which include being promoted as part of a “commitment” on the part of Lifetime to address pressing social issues and being produced in the context of “women’s television” and for an audience comprised mostly of heterosexual wives and mothers. I conclude by positing the TV movie as a regulatory scheme for mediating the representation of the American family, one that seems flexible and open to reworking the very notion of family by incorporating new conceptions of youth homosexuality but that ultimately contains the specter of deviant sexuality.