The hate that dare not speak its name?

Abstract

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural ) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I ). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.