front cover of Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights
Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights
Dispelling the Myth of Mass Opinion Backlash
Benjamin George Bishin, Thomas J. Hayes, Matthew B. Incantalupo, and Charles Anthony Smith
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong public opinion backlash—a sharply negative and enduring opinion change—against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly questions backlash as an explanation for opposition to LGBT rights. Elite-Led Mobilization and Gay Rights argues that what appears to be public opinion backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite-led mobilization—a strategy used by anti-gay elites, primarily white evangelicals, seeking to prevent the full incorporation of LGBT Americans in the polity in order to achieve political objectives and increase political power. This book defines and tests the theory of Mass Opinion Backlash and develops and tests the theory of Elite-Led Mobilization by employing a series of online and natural experiments, surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Obergefell v. Hodges and United States v. Windsor, and President Obama’s position change on gay marriage. To evaluate these theories, the authors employ extensive survey, voting behavior, and campaign finance data, and examine the history of the LGBT movement and its opposition by religious conservatives, from the Lavender Scare to the campaign against Trans Rights in the defeat of Houston’s 2015 HERO ordinance. Their evidence shows that opposition to LGBT rights is a top-down process incited by anti-gay elites rather than a bottom-up reaction described by public opinion backlash.

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Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth
Cedric H. Whitman
Harvard University Press, 1974

In this book Cedric Whitman turns from the heroic poets of Greece to the world of Euripides, less than heroic but still archetypal in its adherence to myth. In a four-part essay he analyzes the three “romances,” Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and Ion, placing them in the poet’s work as a whole.

The keynote is myth, not as a collection of outmoded stories to be rejected or rationalized by the “philosopher of the stage,” but as a fulfilling pattern of personal redemption, never completed in the other extant plays. In this reading, the controversial gods of Euripides are seen as characters in a greater scheme, the myth, rather than as parodies of religion or objects of atheistical satire. The theme of purity, or spiritual wholeness, wrought into the poetic texture, appears as a recurrent symbol of what redemption means to the struggling protagonists. This is an elegant piece of criticism, both in its conception and in its style.

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