Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

Intersectional Rhetorics: A Case Study In The 2013 Supreme Court Decisions On Doma, Proposition 8, And The Voting Rights Act., Michelle Kearl

Michelle Kelsey Kearl

The summer of 2013 saw a troubling social justice whiplash. On June 26th, in two separate decisions the Supreme Court repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and found no standing in the Perry case, also known as the Proposition 8 case, effectively opening the way for gay marriages to resume in California. Just one day before these decisions, a clear victory for mainstream gay rights movements, the same court ruled that the federal government must create a new standard for evaluating how states meet or violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the court did not gut the Act …