Resolved: Gay marriage should be legalized in the United States of America.

Firstly, I feel happier knowing that my opponent is taking a rational standpoint, and using reasonable and objective reasons to halt homosexual unions. I shall firstly address my opponent's 3 points of contention:Firstly, the idea that same sex marriage decays families. My opponent has not defined a family, and I wish to know why. By the oxford dictionary, and almost all other standards[1], a family consists of children and adults. Now, let me tell you something quite shocking: Homosexuality does not affect the family! I know! Studies have been done testing self-esteem, intelligence, and other such traits on children of homosexual parents (compared to heterosexual parents) and has came up that there is no effect that is noticable or even negative[2]. Also, we can see that Vico is a "professor of rhetoric. His degree is in rhetoric. He firstly has no credential in sociology nor history nor any other degree. Therefore, I would like a link to his study, to be able to judge the conclusion. May I have a direct link to his work? Also, I completely deny Kantianism under the grounds of universalisation, so it is wasted on me. If everyone was same-sex marriage is an irrelevant statement: I am not saying that everyone should be. Simply everyone has the right to choose. Is that not what democracy is founded on? The ability that every person can decide?(To all those experienced debaters out there, surely you notice the appeal to authority? He even says it himself: "This is a good example of Authoritative evidence.")The statement that it is biologically "incorrect" is ridiculous. You cannot have right or wrong in biological occurrences. That is the equivalent of saying that because there are more asian ethnicities than caucasian ethinicites, being caucasian is morally incorrect. He goes on to say that homosexuality is "a sexual disease similar to ALD". Biologically speaking or not, this is deeply ignorant. You don't 'catch the gay' as if it were a horrible disease from having sex. You don't 'cure' homosexuality. You can't 'alleviate' the 'sickness' of sexual preference. And the idea that it is a disease is sickening awful. This point essentially proves my third premise: My opponent is advocating a hostility or injustice towards homosexuality due to the idea that it is a "disease". My opponent surely must use a different term, or better yet, abandon this argument altogether to regain some humanity in this debate.I would also like to point out that the second contention has no relevence to any argument. Whether it is biological or not is completely irrelevant, and when we DO link it to a premise, and we create the argument from where it left off to link to the argument at hand, we see the utter horror of the statement.1 - Being Gay is a preference rather than a biological. Therefore, we must restrict this preference, and keep homosexual unions illegal.2 - Because we cannot allow people with diseases to reproduce, we should not allow homosexuals to reproduce (universalising by Kantianism), therefore we should keep homosexuals unavailable to marry.The first statement is the quickest link I can find between the motion and premise/conclusion of my opponent, and is self-explanatory. The second, however, requires a little explanation to make sure we truly understand the horror of the advocation. We are saying that those with disease may not reproduce. I cannot even comprehend the outrage of the masses when we start nullifying marriages and banning unions simply due to disease. Simply because someone has a disease which both people know about, they cannot get married in front of the state and pledge themselves to one another? I see an improvement to this on a strictly productive front, not a weakness. Please, reconcile this: Marriage pledges people to each other, stopping people reproducing "a sexual disease" (using your terminology as a disease). Finally, the third contention means nothing. It is simply a slippery slope: We have good reason to ban incest, it causes mental retardation and other REAL and LARGE problems. All he is arguing is the "sanctity of marriage" which holds no wieght: We are not talking about a religious marriage, we are talking about legality. I would also like to say my first argument was to remove religion from the equation. Now, I will remove socio-economic reasons from the equation, and next I shall finally address the ethics of the equation. Speaking of economics, your largest quote by Kolasinski, you realise he is a finance and economics professor, not a sociological or even philosophical professor, yes?Alright, the first person I wish to talk about is the American President, Clinton. "Throughout my life, I have opposed discrimination of any kind. When the Defence of Marriage Act was passed, gay couples could not marry anywhere in the United States or the world for that matter. Thirteen years later, the fabric of our country has changed," he said, stateming support of the Respect for Marriage Act, which would overturn DOMA. Clinton explained his change of heart: "I had all these gay friends, I had all these gay couple friends, and I was hung up about it. And I decided I was wrong … I think it's a good thing not a bad thing. And I just realised that, I was, probably for, maybe just because of my age and the way I've grown up, I was wrong about that. I just had too many gay friends. I saw their relationships. I just decided I couldn't, I had an untenable position."Clinton was not alone in this journey. Many people have done this: In California, prop 8 showed that 47.5% of people were for allowing homosexual marriage. Americans are seeing that there is no good reason to continue excluding committed couples from marriage. In the federal trial earlier this year, the anti-homoexual league of terror behind California's Proposition 8 failed to come up with any evidence or logic to justify homophobic discrimination. When the Prop 8 lead lawyer Charles Cooper was asked by Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, "What would be the harm of permitting gay men and lesbians to marry?", Cooper replied, "Your Honour, my answer is: I don't know … I don't know", and, in desperation, argued that they "don't have no evidence[4]". The flimsiness of the evidence and absence of logical reasons to discriminate in marriage led Judge Walker to rule that:"Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples … Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."In conclusion, there is no socio-economic reason: Many people are realising that it is unfair to discriminate against them, and the economic discrimination of marraige being barred from joining the register is obvious. Thank you for reading.Standards of oxford, princeton, encarta (even though it doesn't class as a "real" dictionary, due to lack of credentials in comparison to other university dictionaries, and I would prefer we use more highly thought of dictionries, or at least ones that mention etymology such as oxford)http://www.medscape.com...;http://www.aolnews.com...;