The United States should legalize homosexual marriage.

Thank you Con for a good debate, especially on a topic such as this where most people taking a Con point of view would not have nearly as well-articulated views as yours, and would rather be using the typical homophobic arguments. Glad I could find an intelligent opponent to debate! Now for my concluding statements. As I stated in my rebuttal, civil unions and marriages are two totally different things. My opponent repeatedly talks about how we don't have to redefine marriage, yet either he has not been clear on what this means, or I am missing something. As of this moment, it seems that he is advocating allowance of homosexuals to be legally bound to one another, but not married. This is, in essence, a civil union, which as I stated earlier, oppresses homosexuals from many basic freedoms. Either we continue this oppression, or allow them to be married. My opponent may try to contend this by saying we can redefine civil unions, but the entire debate he has been against redefining marriage, so that point would be a near contradiction of his stance on the issue. Regarding the courts, I wasn't completely clear in my rebuttal, since I lead my opponent astray. I understood he was talking about human nature, but I brought up these two newer court cases in order to show that when taking many other factors into consideration, these two courts ruled in favor of the homosexual community. So although in 1910 they found that biological parents do a better job of raising their children than non-biological parents, we know that having any parents raise a child (in the vast majority of cases) is better than no parent. The two newer cases negate this decision by showing that society today has found that two male or two female parents can do a satisfactory job of raising the children. The adoption issue raises some questions in my mind. Namely, the fact that you sourced a piece that even stated "so although the point is not definitively proven, the available evidence is worrisome. " Evidence can be found for just about any argument, but that doesn't make it valid. When the source itself even admits the fact that the point is unable to be proven, it should not be upheld. I stand by the fact that giving these homosexual couples the right to marry would allow them to more easily adopt children. Orphanages are terrible places to be raised. [1] Like I stated earlier: an adopted family is better than no family. The Princeton website is not loading the link you provided, but I'll accept what you say. I also know that you were quoting Aristotle on the idea of a government doing what's right for it's citizens, and I never disputed that. Nowhere in my rebuttal did I say anything about that quote being wrong. What I did dispute is whether or not continuing the US ban on gay marriage is doing what's best for our citizens. I'm actually glad you brought up whether or not I believe we should oppress our citizens, because 1.6% of the US population identifies themselves as gay. [2] This adds up to over 5 million openly gay people in the US, and we can assume tens of thousands are still in the closet. These people are deprived of, as I said earlier, over 1,100 rights that heterosexual married couples enjoy. Depriving 5 million people of their rights. That is oppression. Now for the final issue regarding polygamy, incest, etc. I went to the link provided. The polyamory advocate was the one saying that this "paves the way. " Look at the subtitle. It reads "Supreme Court decisions on marriage unlikely to directly impact status of polygamy. .. " This is not going to lead to the legalization of all these different types of marriages. Finally, the resolution has come under a bit of scrutiny. First, in my opening statements I expressed that I'd be willing to modify the debate before going ahead with it, so you could have easily rejected the debate and asked for the re-wording of the resolution. Now since it has come under some fire, I'll define "should" as I intended in the resolution. Should: verb used to express obligation. . http://www.merriam-webster.com... This means that in the wording of the resolution, the United States has some obligation to legalize homosexual marriage. This obligation comes from both the fact that bans on gay marriage have been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, and these bans are therefore deemed wrong in this country, but also by the fact that we are depriving over 5 million Americans of their rights. For these reasons I urge you to vote Pro. [1] . http://www.replace-campaign.org... [2] . http://www.washingtonpost.com...