Juggling grammars, translating common-place: Justifying an anti-liberal referendum to a liberal public

ABSTRACT

The revival of religion in politics and the rise of anti-liberal movements across Western democracies highlights the need to better grasp the ways participants in public controversies make their agendas intelligible, meaningful, and justified. While most theories of deliberative democracy presume an argumentative format, real-life political agendas often combine conventional arguments with mobilisations of emotions and religious engagement. Based on the analysis of a high-profile debate preceding the 2015 Slovak referendum on same-sex rights, this paper engages the notion of multiple grammars of commonality (Thévenot, 2014), to examine how personal attachments are formatted for public dispute and how different grammars are employed and mixed by referendum proponents and opponents. Discussing the difficulties in grasping religiously grounded standpoints with the pragmatic conceptual toolkit, we conclude that a pragmatic sociological understanding of the role of religion in communicating and composing difference needs to be revisited.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil sphere
• LGBTIQ rights
• referendum
• religion
• pragmatic sociology
• Slovakia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Csaba Szaló, Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, and Werner Binder for their kind supervision of this paper, Risto Alapuro, Laurent Thévenot, Veikko Eranti, and other participants in the ‘Politics of engagement Colloquium’ in Helsinki 2016 for fruitful feedback on the first draft of this paper, Joan Stavo-Debauge for the inspiring discussion about the role of religion in public sphere, and the two anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For a more detailed overview of the 2015 Slovak ‘Referendum on the protection of family’, see Ďurinová (2015).

2 Pragmatic sociology uses the term ‘intermediary object’ to signify a specific medium that helps to focus attention in a dispute. These ‘objects’ are not necessarily of a material character and can take the form of entities qualifying for the common good, publicly available options, or emotionally invested common-places (for more details see Thévenot [2014]). In the case of the pre-referendum debate, multiple objects are at stake, with the referendum as a democratic instrument, the family or the legal regulation of marital status being just the most important ones.

3 A human rights issue naturally opens the possibility of asserting more room for free individual choices, which are simultaneously a civic virtue and an element of powerful shared narratives. Similarly, an initiative grounded so deeply in religious discourses and entangled with religious institutions enters the realms of all three grammars and is not to be dismissed simply as a matter of ideological crusade, a populist project, or the emotional resonance of adherents to a complex common-place.

4 Initially, there was a fourth question: ‘Do you agree that no other partnership than the partnership of a man and a woman shall benefit from the legal protection and rights and duties granted to the heterosexual family?’ This question was, however, excluded from the final set following the review of the petition proposal by the Slovak Constitutional court, which found it in conflict with basic human rights and, thus, unconstitutional.

5 Hereafter, we refer to the discussants by their first names, partially reflecting how they were addressing each other in the debate. As they are all public figures and their identity was publicly disclosed in the debate, we did not deem it necessary to provide them with pseudonyms.

6 The virtual absence from the debate of the third referendum question regarding the right of parents to reject education of their children in bio-ethical issues was likely a side effect of the primary framing of the debate as a battle between Roman Catholic conservatives and LGBTIQ activists. This meta-framing (evident in the opening questions and the direct priming of the moderator, but also in the basic set-up and choice of guests) was probably more favoured by the opponents than the proponents. The systematic opening interrogation of the proponents by the moderator confirms that the objective of the debate was to probe the fitness of the referendum as a civic initiative for a democracy. The ensuing explicit struggle for boundaries of legitimate democratic argument makes this debate, in our opinion, an opportune springboard for the study of the meanings of the referendum for the Slovak liberal democratic public.

7 At the same time, because the good of the referendum may be affirmed (or refuted) in any of the other grammars, the conflict over the referendum’s justifiability runs parallel to the general contest for recognition, in which all grammars are at everyone’s disposal.

8 These citations are made by Anton.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grant Agency of Masaryk University under the project MUNI/A/1317/2016.