Gay Marriage

Thanks for the debate Cameron. My opponent says I'm hating on religious people. However, I have the utmost respect for many religious people; I'm making argument to see if my opponent can refute them, which he obviously can't. And remember, most of his case was built around the idea that we must respect traditional Christian marriages, as defined by God in the Bible. If I prove that God doesn't exist and the Bible is a work of fiction, and my opponent doesn't refute these things, then following the recommendations of the Bible is like modeling our lives after Ghostbusters, Harry Potter, or Requiem for a Dream. 1. Equal Protection The 14th Amendment means TOTAL equality under the law, meaning if straight people can get married, so can gay people. The argument anti-gay marriage advocates currently make is that gays have equal protection because they have an equal right to marry someone of the opposite gender. However, all of my arguments to show that being gay is NOT A CHOICE are to show that this option does not satisfy the requirements of equal protection because there is no way that a gay person can have a valid, loving marriage with a member of the opposite gender (remember, a valid marriage requires consummation). My opponent asks why being gay not being a choice is relevant. It is relevant to my arguments about the equal protection clause. 2. My opponent says "Until People Change, We Shouldn't Force the Change" Firstly, people have ALREADY changed since Gallup found that 53 percent support gay marriage. If my opponent believes that we should always just do what the majority believes, then I HAVE ALREADY WON THIS DEBATE RIGHT HERE. The judge should go vote right now. My opponent asks why Prop 8 passed in California (where I'm from) if 53 percent support gay marriage. The problem with Prop 8 was that it was passed during a midterm election, so the elderly went out to vote in huge disproportion to the general population and the young people voted in really small numbers. Elderly tend to oppose gay marriage and young people tend to support it in overwhelming numbers. So Prop 8 had to do with voting behavior and the election cycle. The vast majority of people in California support gay marriage – too bad the voting system is so broken and voter apathy so high. In addition, my opponent never answers my arguments about the tyranny of the majority. If you take what my opponent has said: that we shouldn't force people to change until their opinion does" then we should never have implemented Brown v. Board, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act. Black people should have been kept in slavery and in segregation until their oppressors spontaneously changed their opinion. That could have taken at least 100 additional years. The entire point of the Constitution is to protects minority rights against the tyranny of the majority, which is why the 14th Amendment is so important and should be applied to gay marriage. My opponent says, "You can't just tell a huge amount of people there is a new law that goes against your biblical proportions, like it or not. That's such a great way of promoting human rights." That's pretty much exactly what we did when ending segregation – we told the South to just deal with it, the law was changing. 3. The Bible My opponent quotes Leviticus. Yet he fails to refute that the Bible is a work of fiction and that God can't exist because omnibenevolence and omnipotence are contradictory. If the majority of Americans believed in ghosts, that doesn't mean that we should have to look to Ghostbusters when making policy decisions. In addition, Gallup shows that IN SPITE of the Bible saying that homosexuality is wrong, many Christians actually believe that homosexuality is okay. Even many Christians don't take the Bible literally and realize that many of the stories were meant to be allegories, not taken literally. 4. Separate is inherently unequal My opponent says, "civil unions could have the same rights if their rights are rewritten." Sure, but the point I was making is that the rights AREN'T rewritten. State legislatures in the more conservative states will continue to ensure that gays do not have equal rights in civil unions. Federal agencies will not recognize same sex partners as the same as married partners, for example with the INS trying to deport gay civil union partners, even though married partners can gain automatic citizenship. We tried the separate but equal thing once before – it didn't work. The discriminated against class was continued to be discriminated against and the separate aspect was just an excuse to continue the discriminiation. 5. Finger length My opponent claims that little boys can castigate each other if their fingers are the same length for being gay. I suppose so, but few little boys read advanced studies. And this isn't my fault, honestly. The truth is the truth. All physical indicators that indicate pre-natal testosterone are similar in heterosexual men/lesbian women and heterosexual women/gay men. 6. Age 7 My opponent asks me if I knew what marriage was at age 7. Honestly, I can't remember. I knew that my mommy and daddy were married. I never really thought about it for myself though. I played and flirted with girls, but I never played pretend married. HOWEVER, my best friend since I was FIVE had two lesbian mothers. I understood at the time what lesbians were, and I understood that he didn't have a father and he seemed just fine. In my life, never has this knowledge detracted from my desire to get married or made me any less attracted to the female gender or any more attracted to the male gender. This argument is such an utter fail. One reason that so many more people support gay marriage now is that they are more likely to KNOW a gay person because of Harvey Milk and many other "come out" campaigns, people are more likely to have a gay friend and people who actually know a gay person are more likely to support gay marriage. 7. Typo Ok cool. My opponent isn't a bigot. I'm sorry he made a typo, but it was kind of a major one. Well the typo was minor, but it majorly changed the meaning of that sentence. I sincerely apologize to my readers that I spelled exactly wrong – apparently when you capitalize all the letters, spellcheck doesn't work. I take full responsibility and hope my readership can move forward with me. 8. Black people can't become white True, but my opponent agrees that they were granted equal rights. Gay people aren't granted equal rights – they can't marry. The correct use of my opponent's analogy is that a black man can't become white just like a gay man can't become straight. 9. Words have power My opponent gives an example that if two male friends are at a re-union together (and gay marriage was allowed), that if they said they were married, people would think to each other. However, this is an unfair analogy. If I went to a high school re-union with a female friend and we said we were married, people might think it was to each other as well (rather than he to her husband and me to my wife). This possible confusion is really not unique to gay marriage. In fact, it implies bigotry to say that it's okay for people to make that mistake with me and a female friend but not with me and a male friend. That reeks of homophobia. My opponent never answers my other two examples. Having to use a different word other than the real one implies stigma of the group that is not allowed to use the real word for what they are doing. People with small penises not being allowed to use the word "sex" and instead say "unsatisfying gyration," that's the same as saying that gays can play house in "domestic partnerships" but cannot get "married" for real. The connotation of domestic partnership is "playing house." It makes it sound like it's not a real marriage. 10. New arguments It's annoying that my opponent brings up STD statistics in the last round. These are brand new arguments that should have been brought up earlier. Don't vote on them. That said, I'll still refute them. Actually, sorry, I can't really since the source is so illegitimate. His source for all of these statistics is Catholic Apologetics International. The study it cites for "33% of homosexuals ADMIT to molesting little boys" is cited as "Family Research Institute, Lincoln, NE." How is that a study? That's an anti-gay group in Lincoln, Nebraska. No other information is provided, such as article title, publication, etc. The second problem with all of his studies, since they all come from the height of the AIDS epidemic, is that the only homosexuals who were openly gay during that time (this was a LONG TIME ago, when being "out" was a HUGE risk) were people who already lived extremely risky lifestyles and were willing to engage in high-risk behavior, like unprotected sex and drugs. All the normal ho-hum homosexuals were unwilling to admit they were gay at that time, so the study captures only extremely high-risk individuals. A 12-year study by the Gottman Institute found that gay couples were no more likely to break up than straight couples and calmed down more easily during fights because they related to each other more easily, being of the same gender. [1] If anything, committing to marriage would be good for homosexuals because if my opponent is so concerned about their promiscuity, a pledge to stay monogamous (i.e. marriage) actually decreases promiscuity. Gay men don't have more unprotected sex than straight men. "A 2007 study reported that two large population surveys found "the majority of gay men had similar numbers of unprotected sexual partners annually as straight men and women." [2] Also, remember the record of straight men isn't much better than gay men. More than 50% of heterosexual marriages end in divorce. According to an MSNBC poll, 28% of married men cheat on their wives. [3] Most studies find that gay men act promiscuous, much like all men, and gay women act un-promiscuous, just like other women. The issue is gender, not homosexuality. Ultimately, even if these statistics were right – that disproportionately, people in the gay community are more likely to engage in behavior that might hurt society, that doesn't justify us denying marriage to the parts of the community who DO want to commit to a monogamous relationship. In fact, this doesn't justify banning marriage at all. Black men are more likely to commit crime and leave their families, statistically speaking. Using my opponent's logic, we shouldn't let black people get married. ==Summary== So essentially my opponent's argument came down to: the Bible opposes gay marriage, Christians believe in the Bible, Christians are the majority, therefore don't allow gay marriage. I showed that the majority support gay marriage (not all Christians blindly follow every word in the Bible), that we shouldn't just do what majorities believe, and the Bible is not a good thing to follow literally. My opponent's new argument is essentially that gay people disproportionately engage in risky behavior. His studies are ridiculously biased and outdated, are untrue, and a group of people disproportionately engaging in bad behavior doesn't mean we can exclude them from the protections of the 14th Amendment. DROPPED ARGUMENTS These two voters were dropped the whole debate: 1. The Equal Protection Clause requires that the law treat gay people exactly the same as gay people. Forcing them to call their marriages by any other name is NOT equal protection under the law since it is demeaning. We couldn't tell black people, yeah you can marry white people, but it'll say "INTERRACIAL PARTNERSHIP" on your marriage certificate rather than "MARRIED." That's bigotry. 2. Utilitarianism. This goes unanswered the whole debate. Gay marriage would generate tax revenue for states that are STRAPPED FOR CASH and would generate jobs in the marriage industry (caterers, photographers, etc), with NO downside, since I've cited studies of countries, like Canada, where gay marriage was legalized without eroding straight marriage rates. My opponent brings up new supposed downsides in his last speech, but 1) these arguments are new and 2) none of these studies prove that gay marriage makes STD's or drug-seeking behavior any worse. If legalizing gay marriage did lead to all these bad thing happening and destroying traditional marriage, why don't we see any of these things happening in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, or Spain, all of which legalized gay marriage. For all these reasons, I urge a Pro vote. [1] http://www.gottman.com... [2] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com... [3] http://www.infidelityman.com...