Language, Culture, Politics

LDS “Young Adults” and

California’s Proposition 8: 
Addressivity, Role-Alignment, and
Mass-Mediatized Mormon Talk

[Brad Kramer]
 Themes/Concepts

 Semiotic: pertaining to the use of signs.

 Addressivity: signs address someone, and our
awareness of who we are addressing or of being
addressed shapes how we use and understand signs

Register: patterned styles of speaking which members
of a cultural group or speech community reflexively
associate with certain values, ideas, tropes, or
stereotypes.
 Role-Alignment: how participation in linguistic
interaction enables us to consciously and behaviorally
align ourselves with certain generic social roles
 Asif Agha:

 Linguistic Register:
 “reflexive models of language use,” ”living social
formations” or “cultural models of action” that link varying
semiotic repertoires to identifiable, “enactable effects,” i.e.
stereotypic behaviors, models of social personae,
religious authority, etc.

Enregisterment:
 Distinctive styles/voices/registers acquire widespread,
sociohistorically durable recognition as reflecting particular
models of social personhood for a community of speakers
 Speakers and addressees align themselves reflexively
with the figures performed through the speech patterns
 Cultural Valorization

 How do certain expressions, ideas, or forms of talk

come to be associated with particular cultural values,
and how do those associations become dominant,
enduring, or widespread?
 Marriage should be between two freely consenting adults
 Marriage should be between two persons of the same
race
 Marriage should be between two persons of the opposite
sex

 What is the status of the third as compared to the first

two?
 Heterosexual Marriage
 How did the LDS Church come to have a heavy stake
in such questions?

Federal non-discrimination statutes and the possible
exemption from them for religious institutions.

Title VII: no discrimination in employment or hiring on the
basis of religion, sex, race, etc.
 ”A school employer may lawfully establish essential job
qualifications that have the effect of excluding persons on
the basis of sex if school is religious and position in
question is "ministerial" or "ecclesiastical" and
qualifications for the position are related to a religious
purpose or mission.” Jocose v. Labor and Industrial
Review Commission, May 1995.
 The Family: A Proclamation

 Presented to LDS women assembled at an annual

general meeting of the Relief Society in October 1995
 Quasi-canonical status

Outlines the alignment between biological sex and
behavioral gender ideals, naturalizing the latter into
the former and making the former into an immutible,
eternal category of self and personhood
 Makes heterosexuality and heteronormativity into core
LDS tenets and ideals
 Proposition 8

 A 2008 campaign to amend California's state

constitution, prohibiting same sex marriage.
 Preservingmarriage.org

David A. Bednar (Mormon Apostle)
 Two points of analytic focus:

 Formal, stylistic elements of Bednar's speaking.

 The progressive, performative diagramming of a

model of generic social personhood enacted
collectively by the questioners.
 Gay marriage as an emerging
national political trend:

”In some places you have courts that are making
judicial decisions that are impacting what takes
place within a particular state. What's happening in
California is that the citizens of the state, a majority
indicated that they wanted marriage defined as
between a man and a woman. The courts in
California overturned that, so now it's going back for
the people to express their point of view. Should it
be between a man and a woman, or should it be
between various types of partners and
relationships?”
 The Prophetic Register

 ”Apostle”---a metacommunicative cue that links certain

features of his speech to pragmatic effects hearers are
capable of enacting:
 construal of speech as prophetic or divinely mandated
 feeling or experiencing the Spirit
 motivation to obey
 experience of self-discovery framed as realization of
eternal truth
 Informal conversational style

Grammatical non-selectivity (vagueness, non-
specificity) in representations of SSM supporters
 Question: “our views” are
“intolerant” or “immoral”
 ”If tolerance is the premise, then it's not a one-way tolerance,
nor a tyranny of tolerance, it goes both ways.… One of the
things that can occur over time is that, if marriage is defined
as a relationship between two of the same gender, there can
be a decreasing tolerance for our beliefs, as members of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints, this very
label of bigotry, from people who don't want to be labeled,
would likely be used more frequently, and with even greater
intensity. So one of the potential consequences growing out
of this, is that we may find a decreasingly tolerant
environment for our beliefs as members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints.”
 “How does this affect me?”

 ”Well people say is, “All we want is our opportunity, it has no

effect on you.” But there are people who push on the edges
of what is legally allowable, and they use the courts to try to
make additional progress to their particular point of view.
Therefore, if you have a church, and it does not recognize
same-gender marriage, then that is discriminatory, and
you should not be allowed to do that. It is not just wild and
crazy to suggest that there could be sanctions against the
teaching of our doctrine, because we focus on marriage
between a man and a woman, and would not place on equal
standing marriage between a man and a man, or a woman
and a woman.”
 “Will we still be able to live our
religion?”
 ”So you're going to have the possibility of inevitable
clashes between religious liberty and free speech….
Now, I'm not suggesting that in one fell swoop, that's
what happens. But, if you throw a rock in a pond, the
ripples extend out for a very long way. This argument
is not just about the rock hitting the water, and the
initial ripple. You also have to consider the extended
ripples over time…”
 Prophetic Register:

 Non-logial (not illogical)

 Speaks to and about an inscrutible and unclear
potential future characterized by equally unclear
consequences

What cynical eyes and ears perceive as weak and
groundless arguments are perceivable for those with
ears to hear as prophetic warnings, precisely because
of the features that don't conform to formal,
argumentative, legalistic logic and reasoning.
 The political consequences of
interaction-level pragmatic effects.
 Interaction viewed by persons already tuned in to
implicit meanings entailed by his ecclesiastical titles.
 Vague warnings about the future connected via text-
level grammatical patterns of (non-selectivity) with
unnamed political foes.
 Truly ambiguous, dangerous threats only truly
discerned by prophets.
 Purpose of video interaction:

 To mobilize Mormon “young adults” as participants in

and organizers of a campaign
 whose purposes it denotes
 whose importance it frames


Effects realized along a different axis from Bednar’s
performance of prophetic authority.
 Addressivity

 As targets of prophetic discourse, the roles of viewer

and co-participant bleed together through alignment.

 Once the role-alignment between viewer and

questioner-interlocutor is accomplished, on both the
level of viewer self-awareness and the level of text
(grammatical and semantic patterns), text-specific
pragmatic features can shape the emergence of
enactable social personae on the viewer's side of
the screen, as it were.
 Questions Asked
 “Massachusetts as already legalized same-sex marriage. I'd never heard about it until
California is now having this issue with Proposition 8.”
 “Elder Bednar, I think a lot of people view the Church's stance on this issue as an intolerant
stance, and basically labeling our views as immoral, when we're really taking a stance for
morality. How do we address that argument?”
 “I am almost nineteen, I'm not married, and I don't have any kids, so, what effect does this
have personally for me?”
 ”My understanding of Prop 8 is that it's to clear up the language, the definition of marriage.
So, what would be the impact on the homosexual population if it passed, or if it didn't pass?”

”And they don't get any new rights from this at all, it's just the title that they're given, if Prop 8
does not pass.”
 ”So, if it wasn't to pass, like, would the ability for us to, I guess, to live our religion or preach
our religion, could we not do that any more?”
 ”So what would the consequences be, to the children?”

”... you've been married, you have kids and grandchildren. What is it—what do you feel
personally about Prop 8? Why is it important to you? I mean, what's the most important
thing to you, why do you feel so strongly about it, having children, having grandchildren.”
 ”You”

 ”You” emerges progressively over the course of the

interaction that plays out on the screen
 A generic social persona into whose role the viewer
steps into while watching

Viewing the interaction with an eye of faith aligns the
role of viewer with questioner, and aligns both with the
”you” of Bednar's talk, with ”truth”, ”the people”,
”prophets”, and ”God.”
 This alignment is accomplished as viewers are led to
the realization (and self-realization) that gay marriage
threatens families and The Family.