Uncompromising Positions: God, Sex, and the U.S. House of Representatives

4. Choosing Folkways

115 4 Choosing Folkways Stateways cannot change folkways. —William Graham Sumner S umner’s aphorism—often parsed as “You can’t legislate morality”—endures as a common refrain in American politics. Yet even if stateways cannot change folkways, stateways certainly can institutionalize and legitimate folkways. The U.S. Congress does this every year—or, at least, it tries. Whereas in chapter 1 I provide a sense of how legislators perceive and cope with culturally significant moral issues (folkways), in this chapter I turn my attention to an analysis of legislator decision making on gay issues, reproductive policy, and school prayer, at two stages of the legislative process (stateways). Legislators place these issues on the legislative agenda for a variety of reasons. For example, a legislator might submit legislation for symbolic purposes (Edelman 1964). Submission also may be simply an act of credit-claiming (Mayhew 1974), or it may be a combination of the two. A legislator may submit culturally significant legislation as a warning shot across the bow of the majority party or the administration to indicate that they care about a particular issue, or the legislator may regard introduction of such legislation, even when it appears futile, as an incremental step in advancing an important policy goal.1 In short, submission of culturally significant legislation may be driven by the electoral connection or by an internal moral imperative. Its 116 Chapter 4 purpose may be symbolic—that is, to make a point; it also may be done in the expectation of changing policy. On a more fundamental level, however, whatever the reason and purpose, submission of legislation on culturally significant issues is worthy of credit-claiming, symbolic posturing, and legislative advocacy because culture conflict at the structural level raises the salience of these issues. Reproductive policy, gay issues, and school prayer represent a larger cultural cleavage. Therefore, legislators care about them, and so do their constituents. One way or another, then, these issues make their way onto the legislative agenda. With that in mind, in this chapter I attempt to address two questions: How do legislators decide? And, with the understanding that these issues represent a cultural cleavage that draws on concerns about status (Tatalovich and Smith 2001), what sorts of considerations affect their decision making? Scholars have tended to study cultural conflicts primarily at the state and local levels (Button, Rienzo, and Wald 1997; Fairbanks 1977; Haeberle 1996; Haider-Markel 1998; Meier 1994; Meier and Johnson 1990; Meier and McFarlane 1993; Mooney and Lee 1995, 1999, 2000; Morgan and Meier 1980; Schecter 2002; Sharpe 1999; Wald, Button, and Rienzo 1996, 2001)—and not without good reason. As a result of state police power, state legislatures often have been the hotbed of cultural and moral policymaking. In an analysis of midwestern state legislatures, Campbell (1980, 57) documents the state-level struggle over “cultural norms” and the “legitimization of values” going as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. As with contemporary moral issues, Campbell notes that legislative disagreement over social mores “was likely when no universal cultural standard existed to mold consensus” (Campbell 1980, 63). The analysis in this chapter takes a different tack. I study decision making in the context of Congress—the national deliberative legislative body (for a few examples of national-level research, see Adams 1997; Haider-Markel 2001; Oldmixon 2002; Steiner 1983; Tatalovich and Schier 1993; Wattier and Tatalovich 1995). Given the increased national salience of issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and (to a lesser extent) school prayer, Congress has had to deliberate over these issues quite a bit in recent years, and this pattern is likely to continue well into the future (Huntington 1974). Choosing Folkways 117 CULTURAL DECISION MAKING IN THE LEGISLATIVE ARENA The collective wisdom of much of the aforementioned literature is that partisanship, ideology, and religion structure legislator decision making. This conclusion makes sense because these phenomena provide individuals with a cultural identity, behavioral norms, and group boundaries (see Wildavsky 1987). That is, party, religion, and ideology inform people about who they are, who they are not, and what behaviors are consistent with their identity and vision of society. These phenomena also inform individuals ’ perspectives toward cultural groups that are competing for legitimacy in the public space. Therefore, the importance of these phenomena is precisely what one should expect in assessing the politics of cultural conflict, and it is consistent with Jelen’s (1997, 55) argument that “the...