Civic Engagement As the Moral Duty to Help: Beyond the ‘Conflict over Family’ in Slovakia

The European policy on the recognition of LGBTQ rights has been encountering a backlash in the post-communist EU member states. In Slovakia, the national referendum about same-sex marriages and child adoption was organized by advocates of the ‘traditional family’ in 2015. Massively protested by LGBTQ rights activists, the referendum triggered so called ‘conflict over family’. This paper studies how people engaged in this conflict make sense of their activism. I explore the civic engagement surrounding these issues by analyzing the interviews with representatives of both sides of this conflict. I investigate the meaning-making process of the activists utilizing the perspective of the strong program in cultural sociology. Whereas other scholars and media often depict the ‘conflict over family’ as a battle between irreconcilable value systems or polarized worldviews, I argue that the civic representatives of both opinion groups draw on the same moral and conceptual meaning structure – the engaged activists see their work as a form of helping others. They make sense of their engagement through the narrative of helping, articulate their feelings of moral duty to help, and, ultimately, perceive their work as a way to moral self-fulfillment. The consensus of activists on the commonsense moral principles can be a fruitful starting point for debates on the topic of same-sex partnerships and LGBTQ rights by providing strategic discursive devices to mediate the discussions of such conflicting issues. Nevertheless, this finding also makes us question: If civically engaged individuals share the same moral reasoning of their work, at what point, or on which layer of meanings, does their reasoning diverge? And how does the shared eagerness to help integrate with the specific narratives and traditions of concrete social movements?