10 Line Rhetorical Analysis

JUSTICE KAGAN: (...the State's principal) interest in marriage is in regulating procreation. Is that basically correct?

MR. COOPER: I — Your Honor, that's the essential thrust of our — our position, yes.

JUSTICE KAGAN: Is — is there — so you have sort of a reason for not including same-sex couples. Is there any reason that you have for excluding them? In other words, you're saying, well, if we allow same-sex couples to marry, it doesn't serve the State's interest. But do you go further and say that it harms any State interest?

Justice Kagan employs several interesting rhetorical techniques in order to make her point. Her natural rhetorical device is ethos and is relative to the setting- the very fact that this case is being heard in the Supreme Court and that she is one of the respected sitting Justices establishes the credibility of the hearing and her opinions. The Justice acknowledges her audience; her fellow justices, the people testifying for the case, and the american public. She appeals to her audience by using clearly framed questions in order to guide and establish the point she is making, first asking Cooper if her summary of his point is "basically correct?" When he answers in the affirmative (using ethos by referring to the opinion being held by "we"), she continues to challenge him clearly on that point, assured that her audience is following her line of thinking.  She successfully uses the Respondent Mr.Cooper as a bounce board for her argument, leading him with questions in order to trap him in a possible logical fallacy. By conceding to him that maybe he has established a reason not to include same-sex couples in the classification, she then pushes his argument to an area of moral and logical innacurac by asking him wether he is then implying that gay-couples must be "excluded." The use of the words "excluded" and "harms" to refer to the legality of Gay-Marriage is also a calculated rhetorical technique. Kagan uses words that inspire a negative image and create pathos. She makes Coopers basic claim seem like it is accusatory and excluding, rather than neutral and logical like she had initially allowed him to frame it. Her audience, following her line of direct questioning, would recognize the trap that Mr.Cooper was stuck in- he could not answer without making a moral judgement- claiming that allowing gay couples to marry would actually harm the states interest- instead of just being irrelevant to it. This logical fallacy can be classified as circular cause and consequence; Cooper implies that because Gay-Marriage does not serve the states interest it is not legalized, but it does not follow that its legalization would actually harm the states interest. Just because it does not "serve" the interest it does not guarantee that it "harms" the interest, so what reason is there from preventing the legalization if it has virtually no effect? Cooper would be hard pressed to answer this question without making a moral judgement or logical fallacy- Kagan has succesfully trapped him by questioning the logos of his own argument.