Resolved: Same-Sex Marriage ought be legalized in the United States

By promoting same-sex marriage, we would be promoting the innate condition of being homosexual and having the rights as a heterosexual counterpart as such, but I fail to see how exactly a marriage or union between two men or women would be a promotion of negative statistics in the homosexual population when not only does the evidence clearly point otherwise because it shows a form of acceptance of the homosexual community, which actually prompts for the reduction of rates, but because marriage is a promotion of stability, loyalty, and settling down. My opponent harps on this idea that the sky is going to start falling if we show any kind of kindness or acceptance of the gay community even though it's the pressure of not being able to fit in and be accepted by the community that prompts suicide, promiscuity, drug use, alcohol use, and other negative things among them. Not to mention that my opponent really doesn't provide any evidence of his own to support his claim except maybe for his reference to Jonathan Goodwin and Mary Sury, which in itself is a vague piece of evidence if I may say so myself considering it doesn't provide any specific numbers or details explaining the occurrence, which not only shows that his evidence is short-sighted but also may have a correlation without a causation. If my opponent could show us the exact numbers of the report made or give me a link in a message or something about the report, I'll be happy to rebut it as such. From there, we can move on to the points I've made about following tradition. When you make an analysis on what my opponent is saying about tradition, you notice that there are two main flaws in his logic: He stated that " You listed all of these totally irrelevant traditions we have followed in the past, but later broke away from them. .. but why marriage? The institution of marriage has been around for a long time, and I don't beleieve anyone plans on breaking it anytime soon. " In other words, my opponent is saying that because this function of marriage has existed for the longest time, that implicitly means we shouldn't break it. Under my opponent's logic, we could argue that sexism and racism are foundations to the society that shouldn't be broken either considering they've been around for the longest time. After hundreds of years of subordination of black people, it was after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that things kind of started to look up for African Americans as equal Americans, after a tradition that stated that African Americans were simply not equals. It took the longest time for women to be able to acquire their equal rights as well with their movements stretching into the 1980s. In fact, women are still subordinated in our country in many ways if you were to look at their experiences as well as their portrayals and expectations. Racism and sexism have been around for the longest time, so why don't we support that as well? The second main problem is the logic that he uses in order to make his point about "breaking the institution of marriage. " The only argument that he offers to my question as to why we can't make this change to marriage is because it would change marriage's institution. Essentially from what I get from his argument, it's saying that breaking a tradition is bad because it's bad to break a tradition (the tradition in question being the institution of marriage), which is nothing more than circular reasoning. .. a logical fallacy. For the record, I may add, the reason why I added information about other traditions we've broken was to show the absurdity in my opponent's case to say that we have to uphold tradition just for the sake of it when we've broken traditions before and it's actually improved our country and the people therein significantly. My opponent had no further arguments against the question of the economics portion supporting gay marriage, so the judges can promptly extend that across the flow. I don't think that Prop 8 is irrelevant at all because it shows us a perfect example of how votes can go either way depending on many variables. California had many gay rights advocates in 2008, but the vote still ended up having Prop 8 go forward. One of the main things that was really interesting about the referrendum was that only 27% of the state voted in the actual election. Take another example: in the 2004 elections, many polls said that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was going to win and that the majority of America supported him, but the outcome of the actual election was that George W. Bush won. When it comes to putting the actual public opinion to a vote, there's so much that goes into elections: the eligibility, the ages of the people voting, the amount of people voting, and the list goes on and on. Placing the opinion to a vote is a very risky move, and to say that gay marriage advocates don't want to put it on a poll is rather irrelevant, to be quite honest, because it doesn't change what the majority of scientific polls analyzing the American community say. They don't want to put it on elections. That's very sad. 53% of America still supports same-sex marriage according to the Gallup poll. It doesn't change anything, so my judges should completely disregard my opponent's rebuttal to Contention 3. I guess that leaves my opponent's argument against my Subpoint 1a. The argument for this subpoint is pretty much the same one that he presents for my argument about tradition, which I have proven to you is nothing more than circular reasoning and faulty logic. I do not disapprove of civil unions (and for him to say so is a strawman), but I don't think that they're the optimal choice for the country because it doesn't provide equality. He also doesn't argue the real meat of my subpoint: that civil unions do not provide the equality that marriage does. My opponent really didn't argue anything as far as my subpoint 1a is concerned, so you can extend that across the flow, and because he doesn't really argue the entirety of my second contention, extend the whole thing as well. Now, we move on to my opponent's case. Judges, you will notice that if you compare the questions in my cross-examination and his answers, you will realize that he just went around my questions and didn't really answer anything. First, he doesn't give us a probability of polygamy or all of the other things he claimed in his slippery slope becoming legal if SSM becomes legal and doesn't give us an empirical example of when that has happened. Second, you will notice that his evidence does not trump mine because it doesn't have enough ethos in comparison to a university-level analysis from the University of California about this same matter. He has a social commentator and a member of Canadian Parliament, which don't really have ethos to make such an analysis, so at this point, disregard his first point. That leaves his second point where he argues that same-sex marriage is sexist. First, he doesn't argue the marriage itself, but argues that homosexuality is sexist because it doesn't consider the individual merits of the woman, and if that's the case, under the same argument, it could mean that heterosexuality is just as sexist because it doesn't consider the individual merits of the man, so his logic is really self-defeating, let alone irrelevant. And in addition to that, is it not sexist to exclude a man from the position of the bride simply because tradition dictates that a woman is supposed to be there without considering the ideals of the other man or the individual merits of the "bride" in question? My opponent really misses logic here in his second point, so you might as well just defeat that point in your considerations for who won this debate.