Resolved: Gay marriage should be legalized.

I'm going to address my opponent's debate and then move on to defend my case. OffenseRebuttal C1a: My opponent brings the standard of what is natural into this debate, but he makes no explanation as to why the condition of being natural (depending on whatever he defines natural to be, considering he didn't define that either) has any sort of relevance to marriage whatsoever. My opponent claims that homosexuality is not natural because evolution requires reproduction and the human race must be sustained. For one thing, I'm not really seeing where the point of reproduction comes in. I guess it implies that marriage requires reproduction in order to be viable, but that would be calling several married couples across the country and the world that either have problems with reproduction or simply don't want to reproduce unnatural as well. My opponent doesn't explain the connection here to marriage. Marriage or not, homosexuals are still going to exist, and the chances are that they will not reproduce either, so his connection of reproduction and the naturality of homosexuality and marriage seems to be almost nonexistent. Also, at the point where my opponent is saying where we need to keep our population going through the process of evolution, it clearly shows that my opponent doesn't have a very clear understanding of the environment. Sure, evolution exists, but every animal population, including the human one, has a carrying capacity, meaning that there is a maximum in every environment that animal populations can only reach. When carrying capacity is met, environmental factors biological or abiotic are going to eventually play in order to maintain the population at regulation, and if what my opponent is saying about homosexuals not being part of the reproductive process and whatnot is supposed to be some sort of argument about how they are absolutely not natural, at the point where they are supposed to be regulators for the population of the human race, they are doing EXACTLY what occurs in nature. If that's not natural, I don't know what natural is. Rebuttal C2: My opponent even says himself that his second contention isn't even much of a reason to keep SSM illegal. Christians would be disappointed. Sure. Why does that matter? My opponent says nothing on this, and he even agrees that this argument isn't even that big. Rebuttal C3: For one thing, this is a big slippery slope argument because it's taking a small reformation like same-sex marriage and turning it into an argument about how it will lead to this big reformation in the future. My opponent has provided no sort of evidence for this except for a blurb about how this is going to happen beyond a shadow of a doubt. Where has this happened before? We have six states that have legalized gay marriage, and there have been no movements on the part of the US to legalize any of this. Same goes for Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Sweden, who have all legalized gay marriage. If there IS a possibility that this could occur, what is the numerical data? What is the estimate? Furthermore, my opponent talks about how legalizing marriage to dogs and whatnot wouldn't hurt anyone and brings up an argument about marrying the dog, but why would that hurt anyone? Why is that going to in any way damage the American society? A man marries a dog. A man marries a man. Why is that going to affect the heterosexual couple next door? Rebuttal C4: My opponent doesn't explain how many people, gay or otherwise, are actually just trying to save on tax dollars. If the judges look back at history, they will see that many marriages were born as a result of necessities, especially in rural regions. My opponent doesn't explain why marriage for necessity is a bad thing, and if marriage really is a sacred institution, he does not provide any evidence of the sort that homosexuals are engaging in the practice of necessity or that gay marriage will increase this. Rebuttal C5: I have an entire contention explaining that gay marriage will actually reduce the negative stats in homosexual communities, for one thing. I believe that I have provided a study from Emory University about how homophobia causes these negative statistics and how the passage of gay marriage would promote tolerance and reduce HIV transmission by 1 per 100,000 as far as the gay community is concerned, supplemented only by a quote directly by the CDC explaining the same idea about homophobia and these negative statistics. My opponent doesn't seem to pay attention to any of this and just goes on to bombard the debate with all of these statistics. The entirety of his C5 reeks of correlation without causation. He states that by being part of the homosexual lifestyle (whatever that is), this immediately will lead us to all these negative effects without even considering the lurking variables of these studies, and this lurking variable is homophobia. It's not the direct condition of being homosexual that causes these negative stats, as my opponent implies. It is the stigma created by society and people acting out on their hatred of homosexuals that creates the reduction of self-image in homosexuals and drives them to these negative conditions. By promoting tolerance in the community through the proper administration of law, these negative statistics will come one step closer to being eradicated, in addition to promoting the monogamy needed to soothe the negative statistics. DefenseCounter C1a: Please look back at my rebuttal against his C5 in order to compare this counter in case I missed anything. Not only this rebuttal another baseless claim with no sorts of evidence and has evidence to the contrary (as provided in my case), but it is frivolous at best, not to mention completely hypothetical. Again. .. where has it happened? To bring up a tangent, were we really going to deny blacks rights about 100 years ago when the KKK came to rise to intimidate them? We sure didn't. Justice should always prevail. Counter C1b: It will help the economy because it increases demand for consumer goods for weddings themselves, adding revenue for business in charge. With the fact that government legislation has changed, it will also increase supply of the actual goods in question. This is just from my humble bit of knowledge from AP Microeconomics. Men wiser than I have written information about how gay marriage increased government revenue and inspired commerce in states that had legalized same-sex marriage in my empirical evidence. If the links are broken in any way, I'll be happy to write the information manually. All my opponent has is this quotation by a random man named Michael Steele that works more on theory rather than empirics and doesn't have any known knowledge of economics, as far as we are concerned. To put it simply, my evidence outweighs my opponent's. Further, tax breaks are sometimes needed so that Americans can make more economic decisions, thus expanding the private sector. Counter C2a: Marriage is not a right anywhere? Like in Article 16 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights? Or perhaps in the Supreme Court decisions Turner v. Safley (1987) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), all ruling that marriage is a fundemental right? Furthermore, at the point even when marriage is only a privilege, that implies that there are conditions that one must have in order to attain this said privilege, and if my opponent is somehow trying to imply that being homosexual makes you ineligible for this said privilege, then that's nothing more than prejudice. Shouldn't Americans all have at some level the same access to the same privileges with morally relevant reasons? Counter C2b: My opponent even concedes that there are no tax benefits to civil unions, and at the point where homosexuals are not applicable for these privileges simply because they're homosexual, that's just morally irrelevant discrimination (prejudice).