About

Our names are Clyde Staley, Neha Soni, and Joe Young, we are current English 101H students at the University of Maryland, and we are the writers of this series of blogs.  The three of us share an interest in the fight for equal rights in the LGBT community, and how the fight for equal rights has developed or changed  between the 1960’s and today.

The blog series is focused around two speeches, one given by Dr. Franklin Kameny in 1969, and one by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011.  We chose these speeches because they both discuss how current rights for LGBT citizens are unfair, that gay people are human, and that rights and privileges shouldn’t be determined by a person’s sexual preferences.  Dr. Kameny is an attorney, and his speech is directed at a judge in a case in which Kameny is defending Mr. Benning Wentworth’s right to work for the United States Department of Defense.  The Department of Defense denied clearance for Mr. Wentworth to work for them because at the time Mr. Wentworth was a practicing homosexual.  Dr. Kameny argues that being gay does not affect Mr. Wentworth’s ability to successfully perform at his job.  Dr. Kameny’s speech has added significance due to the fact that Dr. Kameny himself is a homosexual man.  Hillary Clinton’s speech was delivered to the United Nations in 2011.  The goal of her speech is to convince the entire world that gay rights are human rights, and that being a member of the LGBT community does not make that person any less human than a straight person.  Our blog is intended to connect these two speeches, and highlight the common argument that these two speakers share; that gay people deserve the same rights as everybody else.

This blog series comes at an important time in national news.  Currently, we are in the middle of a huge political battle on whether or not gay marriage should be legal in the United States.  As of right now there is a noticeable turning of the tables as far as gay marriage rights.  Gay marriage, once considered to be illegal and not humanly,  is now being more and more accepted in society, and some states have even finalized laws legalizing gay marriage.  Hopefully, by the time the readers have read our blog posts, they will understand the viewpoints of Dr. Kameny and Clinton, and why they believe gay rights should be equivalent to the rights of all citizens.

Every blog post is directed primarily at one of the two speeches, but each post also includes a comparison to the other speech.   This methodology makes it easier to highlight the main argument of each speech because it takes the important details of both the speeches, and includes the appeals to pathos, ethos, logos, kairos, and style.  By the end of reading all the posts, the readers should be able to easily identify the main argument, and the reasons why Dr. Kameny and Clinton were so focused on bringing attention to the subject of gay rights.

This blog series is based on a huge political debate currently going on in the United States.  The blog series is based on two speeches trying to convince listeners of believing in a certain viewpoint that gay rights are human rights, and that it is morally incorrect to believe otherwise.  These blog posts highlight the appeals to the speech listeners emotions in an attempt to try and sway the listeners that all humans deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preferences.