Champions and Oppressors: The Varying Roles of the Supreme Court Towards the Queer Community

The United States Supreme Court has a long history of engagement with the queer community in America. As the public consciousness slowly turns in the direction of judiciary reform, the Supreme Court's record of both successes and failures in the arena of queer rights should be brought into consideration. In this qualitative study, I interviewed professionals and subject matter experts from across the spectrum of queer-rights causes and Supreme Court studies, bringing responses into conversation with past research and historical reality. Interviews were conducted on a semi-structured basis, tailored to the specific expertise of the interviewee; responses were manually examined to uncover patterns and common threads in the data. This analysis yielded that the queer community tends to be extremely leery and even fearful of the Supreme Court because of its past role in suppressing the community and its failure to provide queer people with basic rights without massive political pressure. These behaviors are primarily a result of excessive politicization and polarization of the Supreme Court, which is institutional in nature and can only be resolved through direct judicial reform efforts. The reform option most conducive to repairing the divide between the Court and the community would involve establishing a set of term limits for Supreme Court justices, ideally the proposed system of eighteen-year terms. As America enters a new era of the struggle for queer rights, it is vital to understand the roles played by institutional actors such as the Supreme Court and develop reform measures that can leverage those actors in ways beneficial for the queer community, as well as other marginalized communities.