Priscilla Otero Guerra
Family is central to political socialisation. The politicisation of the American family in the United States is a bipartisan strategy and a powerful influence on social development. Politicians have a proclivity to discuss family, inasmuch that the publication of family images for public imagery as political strategy is not a novel occurrence. As political scientists Laurel Elder and Steven Greene articulated in The Politics of Parenthood (2013), without standard regard to LGBTQ families, “parenthood represents a significant and underexplored agent of adult political socialisation.” LGBTQ families of the United States must be included in the national public U.S. imagery to support liberal democratic norms given that parenthood is vital to political socialisation.
Politicians and Family Values as Ideology
Perspectives influenced by beliefs are powerful agents that structure public imagery. To be specific, beliefs are ideas emerging from socialisation and have been proven to contribute to political polarisation, social-economic inequalities, and violence. Politicians use images capturing action to portray themselves in alliance with political party ideology. Public members of the Republican Party in the United States systematically release photographs to the public of their heteronormative nuclear families, many of whom have young children, to reinforce commitment to collective political ideas of family values as ideology.
Family values are a politicised ideology consisting of beliefs in support of criminalising abortion, support for neoconservatism, support of expansive yet rigid traditional gender roles in American society, against divorce, against homosexuality, and against redefining marriage as a union between men and women. Values of family, ideas held as beliefs to what family should do, which may consist of socio-political ideologies, are not congruent to family values ideology. Southern states have traditionally, in culture and economics, associated family values ideology with the Protestant church. The family values system perpetually encourages nuclear families when compared to the average family in the United States, an abundance of children while in a heterosexual marriage, and somehow, in the same vein, gun ownership as a signifier of success.
In 2021 United States Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado innocuously aroused public controversy in the United States when a photograph of her smiling family, consisting of her young children bearing guns in front of a Christmas tree, was published for the public. The caption to the photograph on a popular social media platform read, “The Boeberts have your six, @RepThomasMassie!" Representative Lauren Boebert’s photograph was in response to United States Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and his earlier photographic release of his rather large patriarchal family, wielding rather large guns, with the caption “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo” days after a mass shooting in Michigan.
Images can arouse support or negation for a socio-political cause. Representative Lauren Boebert and Representative Thomas Massie's campaign for the U.S. constitutional right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, with rigid beliefs against revisions of the amendment, is expected given that gun ownership is a component of family values ideology. For those unfamiliar with the American concept of family values, photographs of gun-clutching nuclear families might be perceived as abrasive, if not, inciteful. For those in the United States, however, guns are perceived as symbols of resistance to tyranny, for the protection of self and family. Gun ownership as a family affair in the United States is a social reality and a reflection of not simply national identity, but personal identity. Geography and political party membership influence perceptions of gun ownership. In contrast to urban areas, rural areas are more supportive of Second Amendment rights without revisions. Democrats are more supportive of gun restrictions. Likewise, while the LGBTQ population has had no set political party affiliation, political membership for LGBTQ families in the United States has been more successful with the Democratic Party due to national migration patterns to northern urban areas. Democratic state legislation pertaining to the progressive civil and economic rights of homosexual citizens has been traditionally socially liberal. In contrast to the Democratic Party, Republicans frequently share family imagery with the public in support of a nationalised perspective of family which provokes and amplifies conversations on family identity.
A simple search of images released to the public of Republican Party members reveals the use of heteronormative families with children to advocate for public policies and the GOP political platform. The differences between political parties have resulted in differing domestic regional imagery of LGBTQ families by location over time. Family values imagery is often supported by direct action such as the Texas Republican Party Platform. In support of constitutional regionalism, the Texas Republican Party Platform explicitly reaffirms marriage between one biological male and one biological female to respond to recent LGBTQ equality national laws and increasing media inclusion of LGBTQ individuals. Actions portrayed in images for society’s consumption have the potential to evolve the habitus and representation of LGBTQ families in the public imagery of the United States or devolve them. Family values ideology is incorporated as a belief system with a subset of ideas or issues that are then applied to society.
The Body as a Transmitter of Messages
In 2022 Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis staged a photograph of himself surrounded by onlooking school children in support of a campaign against LGBTQ parental rights in state-supported schools. The photograph was officially released within the context of fighting for the collective future of American children, vilifying opposition, as Governor Desantis signed the controversial “Parental Rights in Education” bill into law. The law effectively censors LGBTQ families by prohibiting discussion of sexual and gender identity in classrooms from kindergarten to grade three. It is a discernible assumption that LGBTQ families consist of young children. Categorising LGBTQ families as a topic of discussion that is not age-appropriate presently disregards the parental figures of young children in the state of Florida. The photographic image of private school uniformed white children in the presence of a bill’s passing those limits freedoms to state-funded school children, when the socioeconomic status of LGBTQ families and most of the citizens of the United States limit private school enrolment, signals classist elitism.
Ron DeSantis is an embodiment of perceptions of white American upper-class culture, an identity he performs for national media headlines to pillar family values ideology. His re-election campaign for Governor of Florida in 2022 never announced to the public with words that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was the quintessential successful heteronormative family man protecting the country’s children’s future, except in the 2022 campaign advertisement slogan “God made a Fighter”, but images and political actions alluded to a conservative and traditional elitist version of the American dream to a global audience. At the time, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson AC advised that Governor Ron DeSantis as president of the United States would result in a “coherent global leader.” As a Republican, Ron Desantis utilises family values ideology as armour in defence of southern rural values. Now that Ron DeSantis is on the campaign in 2023 for the Republican presidential nomination, his wife Casey DeSantis launched a national campaign ‘Mamas for Desantis’ advocating for parental rights within the paradigm of the ideology of family values.
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty understood the body to be a transmitter of messages perceiving surrounding objects. Our bodies are in the act of performance responsive to social structures constructed by history. As philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff put forth in Visible Identities (2005), social identities are relational, contextual, and fundamental to self and the visibility of identities is “vital to allocate roles and to structure interactions.” Political actions are images that allude to a perception of societal power centred on designated roles. Images in society, in their various constructions, represent society or perceptions of collective wants. By induction, images convey a powerful social understanding of acceptability to the onlooker. World Advertising Research Center published a study by Northey et al in 2020 on LGBTQ representation in advertisements in the United States and found that “individuals' political ideology determines their emotional response to such advertisements.” If advertisements can elicit emotional responses, political images can inhibit them. When political images elicit variable emotional responses, they can become tools for diversity and inclusion. As of 2022, LGBTQ marriage equality is national law in the United States and a foreign policy objective of the Biden Administration. Media representation of LGBTQ individuals in the entertainment industry is rising. Thus, a vital question must be asked: What is the future for LGBTQ families in the state of Florida and of other similar states where family values ideology reign?
The Importance of Political Imagery
Positive political images have the power to represent and hence reinforce the diversity found in families across the United States. However, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) released a statistical study of political violence that found “acts of political violence targeting the LGBT+ community have more than tripled compared to 2021” in the United States including “attacks by spontaneous, violent mobs; law enforcement; and/or extremist individuals or groups.” The tragic 2022 shooting in Colorado of Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub, by the grandson of a Republican Party representative, is an alarm toward the extremism encountered in the United States. Radical actions, including an increasing amount of online hate constructed of anti-LGBTQ political images, have increased in response to the Biden-Harris Administration’s inclusionary domestic and foreign policies on LGBTQ equality. Representing members of the LGBTQ community with positive political images will reduce similar acts of violence and support liberal democratic norms of inclusivity.
Philosopher Charles Taylor stresses the importance of recognizing identities to fulfill universal human potential. Recognition is human dignity. Human dignity consists of power; that is power expressed in the importance of actions in ordinary life. Human dignity is in self-sufficiency and in receiving positivity from others, humans, as Taylor wrote in Sources of the Self (1989), “find the sense of life through articulating it.” Positive political images have the power to reinforce the diversity found in families across the United States and give power by representation to individuals harmed by political violence. A 2019 study by the Family Equality Council obtained evidence that around 3.7 million children under the age of 18 had an LGBTQ parent. The United States census reported in 2020 that 15% of 1.1 million same-sex couples in the United States had children, with numbers rising, compared to around 40% of opposite-sex couples. The importance of inclusion in the nation's public image supports liberal democratic norms and can reduce hierarchical social violence. Omission and misrepresentation in society reduce the sense of life while family values ideology categorises homosexual families as less in value when compared to heterosexual families, if not categorically immoral, and a vicious threat against a patriarchal nature of heteronormativity that needs protecting. International representation of American LGBTQ families in diplomacy can ignite a conversation for support of global liberal democracies and prevent international support of such beliefs against LGBTQ families. Diplomatic actions, such as allowing U.S. embassies to fly the LGBTQ flag, would be buttressed and enhanced by U.S. national imagery that includes LGBTQ families.
The reference to family values ideology and the use of images particularly associated with the Republican Party is not to state that political officials of the Democratic Party do not release photographic images to the public of their families. The politicisation of families with images has legacies in both political parties. Compared to political officials of the Republican Party, the purpose of the family images of Democrats is typically not to instill perceptions of family values into the public imagery as a system of beliefs component of an ideology or even as a response to family values ideology. As can be observed, gun ownership is not a common Democratic family value in the normative sense nor is the belief of representative protection against a tyrannical national government. Democrats most frequently emphasise family diversity, more so family differences in policies. Former Democratic President Barack Obama, both in campaigns and in office, often utilised photographs and speeches evoking imagery against the absent father stereotype typical of perceptions of African American families at the time. Images were met with collective praise from the African American community and represented social progress.
The Future for LGBTQ Families in the U.S. National Imagery
On the national front, members in power of the two leading national parties meagerly mention LGBTQ families’ rights, whether by representation in photographic images for the national public image or in public policy measures. Further questions emerge from Republicans placing family as a sense of power, with political images of families and children while Democrats do not: Will recent historic levels of LGBTQ representatives in Congress innovate the public image of family in the United States? What could be the global political implications? What of political party members in the United States erasing LGBTQ families from their constituency and the national public imagery?
Societal definitions of family have traditionally omitted families when there are no visually identified heterosexual norms in the socially defined unit. The imagery of stability that families convey, with the projection of likeness to persisting social expectations elicited, are powerful political tools. Campaign speeches utilise the topic of families frequently to garner electoral support, and photographic images are included in these efforts. Families are an important measure of societal stability and policies passed by Congress influence families, the potential to create them, and the natural human need to belong in society. Regardless, the politicisation of family and the imagery elicited, in both the Democratic Party and the GOP, disproportionally continues to remain white-cultured, classist, and heteronormative. The national homosexual imagery continues to portray LGBTQ individuals as a sexualised exotic, an individualist antagonist, with imagery of omitting families with children as an important societal measure worth valuing. Beliefs on hierarchy, perceptions of who has value in society, are then inherently accepted by electoral voters as collective social norms for leadership positions or exclusions in American society. Therefore, political images influence multiple powerful sectors of society, including business, education, and the entertainment-media industries compounding the national imagery of who has value in American society.
In terms of U.S. foreign policy, images provoke emotional responses established from peoples’ self-sustaining beliefs and value systems. The United States government supports LGBTQ rights abroad. In support of liberal democratic norms of inclusion and with an ethos of democratic ideals backed by human rights doctrines, the U.S. has implemented development initiatives to enhance LGBTQ acceptance worldwide. The issue is whether domestic reflections reflect diplomatic wants. At the same time, there remains a lack of representation of LGBTQ families abroad, whether it be in ambassadorial positions or in dialogue with less accepting countries. National imagery can be a foreign policy tool if LGBTQ families are represented as significantly American.
Politicians are fundamental to a democratic society and are public leaders in the representation of a nation. Politicians’ actions become political once their actions are perceived by the populace in socialisation and thus, politicians have the moral obligation to prohibit discrimination and political violence with national constitutionally protected justifications. In the same vein, national security efforts should include adherence to inclusivity and adhere to civil rights practised publicly. In present while LGBTQ representation has increased in media outlets, while recent polls from institutions such as The PEW Research Center show that around 55% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats are now accepting same-sex marriage, there continues to exist a support for anti-LGBTQ legislation. It is now more imperative than ever that the national imagery of the represented American people instill an LGBTQ public imagery of social success, acceptance, and leadership to prevent further exclusionary hierarchical violence.
