Family Feuds: The Relationships between Legal Changes and Media Framing Concerning the Family

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow do legal changes affect discourse concerning family forms? The concept of the family is conventionally assumed to be stable and unchanging; yet, the idea of family is continuously defined and redefined by the law. I analyze the nature of media framing before and after federal legislative changes, specifically the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and Windsor v. United States (2013). I investigate 156 articles about same-sex marriage legislation published in The New York Times. Results show that legislative events and court decisions influence the framing of family and family forms. DOMA influenced the discourse surrounding family composition by strictly defining the family unit, centering it on a heteronormative framework of one man and one woman. Windsor affected the discourse concerning the role of children by shifting the focus away from LGBT parents as unfit or dangerous to children and toward a structural and societal assessment of discrimination. Both DOMA and Windsor affected public discourse about morality. These findings support the idea that legal changes affect conceptions of the family and reveal how these conceptions can change in the broader public imagination.