Does Believing Homosexuality Is Innate Increase Support for Gay Rights?

Why are Americans who believe homosexuality is innate more likely to support the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals (LGBs)? Attribution theory suggests that people are more likely to support LGB rights if they do not blame LGBs for their sexual orientation. Alternatively, moral condemnation of homosexuality may lead both to belief that homosexuality is a choice and opposition to LGB rights, while acceptance of LGB rights may lead to a belief in a biological basis for homosexuality as part of a constellation of tolerant beliefs. Using logit analysis on individual‐level data from 24 national surveys conducted since 1977, I find that the link between belief in a biological basis for homosexuality and support for LGB rights is strong and growing for almost all groups on almost all issues. The reason may have more to do with people shaping their origin beliefs to match their political and religious values, than with origin beliefs affecting support for LGB rights.     

Pillars and electoral behavior in Belgium: The neighborhood effect revisited

This paper explores the processes behind the neighborhood effect in electoral geography. Studies on neighborhood effect have largely ignored the local institutions and cultural milieu within which people are socialized. By taking into account the spatially differentiated social embedding of individuals, we are able to highlight the impact of local institutions on electoral behavior and restore the temporal dimension that has shaped the political specificities of places. In the case of Belgium, we show that social embedding (which took the very accomplished form of pillars) affects voting behavior through two different channels: a direct effect, coming from the family transmission of pillar values, and a contextual effect captured by a measure of the local embeddedness of the pillar.     

The Friends and Family Plan: Contact with Gays and Support for Gay Rights

According to both the contact hypothesis and gay rights advocates, coming out to straight friends and family members should increase acceptance of homosexuality and support for gay rights. If lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals (LGBs) come out primarily to people they expect to be accepting, however, the repeated finding that people who know LGBs are more likely to support gay rights could be overstating the impact of coming out. Using individual‐level data from 27 national surveys, I find that similar variables predict both knowing LGBs and supporting gay rights, but in different ways. Even after controlling for those demographic, religious, and political variables—and sometimes also for beliefs about whether some people are born gay and whether homosexuality is immoral—people who know LGBs are much more likely to support gay rights. The effect holds for every issue, in every year, for every type of relationship, and for every demographic, religious, and political subgroup.     

Viewing animal bodies: truths,practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in UK livestock breeding

This paper focuses on the production of aesthetic ‘truths’ in UK livestock breeding, drawing on detailed qualitative research with breeders and breed societies. It extends emerging interest in the aesthetic in human geographical research, examining how aesthetic judgements about non-human animals depend, in part, on the agency of the animal and their inter-subjective relations with humans in specific places. Aesthetic evaluation further produces implicit judgements about animals' ethical considerability, at the same time obscuring the effects of such judgements on their framing and treatment. Aesthetic evaluation is thus related to sets of material and ethical interests. The paper develops a more-than-human reading of Foucault's biopower, which explores how truths about visual evaluations of animals become established. Two empirical perspectives explore, first, a ‘relational practical aesthetic’ for evaluating beef cattle and sheep, exploring the implications of the aesthetic framing of specific animals and, second, the tensions involved in looking at animals when different aesthetic truths conflict and when traditions of aesthetic evaluation encounter genetic modes of evaluation. The paper concludes by discussing the ethical implications of ongoing transformations of evaluative modes in livestock breeding, suggesting that shifts away from inter-subjective modes of aesthetic evaluation further diminish the ethical status of animals.