Catalysts for Violence: Bringing the Dangerous Speech Model into Social Movement Studies Through Analysis of Anti-Abortion and Anti-Gay Direct Mail

Social movement studies and the growing fields of right-wing and extremism studies would benefit from improved tools for assessing the relationship between speech and violence. This paper integrates the "dangerous speech and ideology" analysis (Maynard and Benesch 2016) into framing and collective identity studies, as a useful tool to understand and identify the relationship between rhetoric and violence in movements. To develop and demonstrate this integrated theory, the paper applies the dangerous speech and ideology model (DSM) to direct mail sent by Christian Right organizations during the period of heightened anti-abortion and anti-gay violence in the United States from the late 1970s to 1990s. The contributions of the paper are 1) to explicate the elements of the dangerous speech model and integrate them with the literature on framing and collective identity processes, and 2) to use the enriched dangerous speech model to analyze the anti-abortion and anti-gay communications from prominent Christian Right social movement organizations. The paper finds the presence of violence-catalyzing speech that correlated with the period of heightened anti-abortion and anti-gay violence, and suggests further avenues for the DSM in social movement research.