Framing Same-sex Marriage in Canada and the United States: Goodridge, Halpern and The National Boundaries of Political Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article draws on post-positivist policy analysis and social movement theory to explore the impact of law in shaping the politics of social movement claims and discursive construction of same-sex marriage as public policy issue in Canadian and American politics. Using the concept of framing, the article discusses the ways in which lesbian and gay rights claimants in Canada and the USA have framed the issue of same-sex marriage in two landmark North American rulings on same-sex marriage, Halpern (Ontario) and Goodridge (Massachusetts). The article finds that, despite differences in legal policy legacies between Canada and the USA, there is a common rights frame governing lesbian and gay struggles over same-sex marriage. Although working with different legal frameworks, judicial precedents, statutory law and human rights protections, courts reached remarkably similar conclusions about same-sex marriage and largely endorsed nearly all of the elements in the rights frame put forth by lesbian and gay litigants. Despite similarities in the framing of lesbian and gay rights issues in the two countries, the article demonstrates that the central difference in the same-sex marriage debate in Canada and the USA concerns the place of the rights frame within the broader political culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.060 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".