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Full-Text Articles in Law
Sexual Minority Stigma And System Justification Theory: How Changing The Status Quo Impacts Marriage And Housing Equality, Jordan A. Blenner
Sexual Minority Stigma And System Justification Theory: How Changing The Status Quo Impacts Marriage And Housing Equality, Jordan A. Blenner
Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Sexual minorities (i.e. lesbians and gay men) experience systemic discrimination throughout the United States. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), in many states, same-sex couples could not marry and sexual minorities were not protected from sexual orientation housing discrimination (Human Rights Campaign, 2015). The current, two-experiment study applied Jost and Banaji’s (1994) System Justification Theory to marriage and housing discrimination. When sexual minorities question dissimilar treatment, thereby threatening the status quo, members of the heterosexual majority rationalize sexual minority discrimination to maintain their dominant status (Alexander, 2001; Brescoll, Uhlmann, & Newman, 2013; Citizens for Equal …
Declining Controversial Cases: How Marriage Equality Changed The Paradigm, Elena Baylis
Declining Controversial Cases: How Marriage Equality Changed The Paradigm, Elena Baylis
Articles
Until recently, state attorneys general defended their states’ laws as a matter of course. However, one attorney general’s decision not to defend his state’s law in a prominent marriage equality case sparked a cascade of attorney general declinations in other marriage equality cases. Declinations have also increased across a range of states and with respect to several other contentious subjects, including abortion and gun control. This Essay evaluates the causes and implications of this recent trend of state attorneys general abstaining from defending controversial laws on the grounds that those laws are unconstitutional, focusing on the marriage equality cases as …