Moral Hazard, Governing Culture and Localized Christian Right Gay Panic in Indiana

Abstract

I examine a moment in conservative Christian political action producing the revocation of a specialty automobile license plate of the Indiana Youth Group (IYG), a support organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teenagers. After a brief introduction to the Christian Right’s anti-gay ideology, I examine the political opportunities of the Right’s agenda at national and local scales. While the Right was successful in preventing inclusion of gays in federal civil rights laws, there existed dissatisfaction with the absence of government efficacy to promote their ideological goals. Thus the Right turned to local or state political institutions to further their governing culture power which paralleled the rise of Republican Party majorities in state legislatures beginning in the 1980s, especially in the Midwest and the South. Attention turns to an examination of practices and discourses of conservative Christian non-state and state actors to target and revoke the newly adopted and “pro-homosexual” IYG specialty license plate. A well networked group of Christian Right non-state actors distributed flyers to churches and state legislators to prevent in their worldview the spread of secular humanism across the state. Twenty state senators were successful in pressuring the state’s license plate issuing agency to revoke the license plate after legislative attempts had failed. Those twenty were generally older white males, represented largely rural districts, and possessed life experiences as small business owners, and members of the military or law enforcement. To traditionalists, the banal and quotidian nature of specialty license plates constituted a moral hazard by normalizing an “immoral” culture in public spaces whereas those adopting the IYG specialty license plate are proclaiming their stakeholder citizenship rights to govern culture. What constitutes moral hazard changes based on larger scale cultural and social transformations?