Susie O’Brien’s article ‘It’s time to honour gay couples and allow them to marry’ The Advertiser, November 20, 2010, p. 27) is an argument about gay couples not being able to marry legally like their heterosexual counterparts, O’Brien calls it discrimination and states that the government need to change the laws in order for equality. O’Brien doesn’t have very factually strong arguments so to make her opinion justified she uses personal stories and emotive language to persuade the reader which is an appeal of pathos.
O’Brien opens her argument with two personal stories. The first story she uses is how as a child she never had to choose to be straight and that she could never imagine being discriminated for something she had no control over.
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This was possibly an attempt to appeal to logos, as O’Brien was trying to make the point that if the government passed the law that eventually people that are currently against gay marriage would come around once they see that it would have little to no effect on their lives.
Lastly O’Brien uses statistics from The Bouverie Centre to reassure readers that the opinion she has persuaded them of is true. This is possibly the strongest part of O’Brien’s whole article, despite it not having reference to a particular study as it provides statistical information on the family lives of gay couples in Australia. This is a somewhat strong logical appeal although it would be stronger if O’Brien would have looked at the statistics of heterosexual couples as a parallel to established both sides of family lives and in particular the longevity of relationships. To conclude her piece O’Brien bookends with another attempt to appeal to ethos by using emotive language such as ‘bizarre social experiment’. She also talks directly to the reader in the last portion of the piece, which helps us to establish that O’Brien believes that the target audience for her article is people who are against gay marriage as she uses statements such as ‘you might not like the idea of attending a gay wedding’ and ‘you might not want your son or daughter to be gay’ which is her assuming that her audience were previously against