David Von Drehle’s article about the recent controversy in an elected Kentucky Clerk 's office describes Kim Davis ' refusal to issue same sex marriage licenses and stresses that it is not her place to do so.
In this article, David Von Drehle uses strong rhetoric to convince the reader that it is not Kim Davis’ place to refuse to issue marriage licenses. He starts out with the phrase “The heat around gay marriage is obscuring what a simple distinction this actually is. But suppose the Rowan County Clerk was a devout Hindu” (Von Drehle Time) Starting out with this phrase has a strong impact on the reader immediately. In our society, gay marriage opposers are notorious for citing “religious freedom” in order to not serve the LGBT community, and by and large we have accepted this. By bringing a somewhat obscure religion- Hinduism- into the discussion, Von Drehle is able to give the reader a better picture of what Davis is actually doing- and by forcing the reader to recognize that for anything else, citing religious freedom would not be an excuse to not perform one’s duties as an elected official in a community. By starting out with a question to the reader rather than an opinion he wishes the
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His target audience is most obviously the readers of Time Magazine, as these are the majority of the people who will read his article. Since Time’s readers are largely liberal and educated, he has a strong foundation of support for jumping right in to his opinion that gay marriage should be supported, and even if Kim Davis does not want to support it, it is her civil duty to do so. For a wider audience, Von Drehle may have found it necessary to spend more time on why gay marriage should be supported, and a partly satirical piece may not have been appropriate. Von Drehle knew the profile of his audience, and he catered to them with this