Participated in a debate today. It was a tightly-structured panel discussion at Southwestern College here in the San Diego area. The topic was homosexual "marriages," and the participants were me, a law instructor, a psychology instructor, and a lawyer from the ACLU who was also a lesbian. The debate largely turned into a discussion between me and the lawyer lady, with a little input from the others.
It went quite well. The main arguments of both sides got put forward, we had a chance to rejoin each other’s arguments, threw in some humor, and got the audience engaged (as illustrated by their applause after telling points were made). I’m going to try to contact the lawyer lady and thank her for a good debate. (She got out of there very quickly after the event.)
In preparing for debates and major interviews, I try to "game out" the discussion ahead of time in my mind. (This can cause problems, because it can leave me awake in bed at 2 a.m. twisting arguments around in my head, but that’s an occupational hazard; it’s what you have to do to get the job done right.) Today’s debate was the first one I’ve done on homosexual "marriage," and the first occasion I’ve had to debate homosexuality in a number of years, so for a day or two ahead of time I gave myself a mental workout on the subject.
One of the arguments I was particularly concerned to have a solid, snappy answer for is the claim–which was sure to come up–that homosexuality exists in the animal world and that this makes it "natural" for humans as well. This is an argument that must be convincingly rebutted, because otherwise it undermines the natural law argument against homosexuality, leaving only a religious argument, which in the present, secular public sphere is doomed to fail.
Since it is true that animals do sometimes display homosexual behavior, the obvious rejoinder to the "animals do it too" argument is that just because animals do something, that doesn’t mean it’s good for humans to do. This answer has the benefit of being true, but stated in that form it has the detriment of being boring. It’s not a "grabber," and it smacks too much of your parents saying, "If all the other kids wanted to jump off a bridge, would you jump off too?" That kind of argument probably caused you to stop paying attention when you were a kid, and the same danger presents itself here. It doesn’t matter how true the rejoinder is; if it isn’t presented in an arresting manner then the audience will stop paying attention and won’t take it seriously.
So I ruminated on the charge, and in the wee morning hours, the answer revealed itself to me. I had a good, snappy way of presenting the argument that would grab the audience’s attention and force them to take it seriously. Here’s what I came up with, and ended up using in the debate:
It’s true that some animals do display homosexual behavior, but that doesn’t mean that it is morally justified for humans to engage in it.
Black widow spiders try to kill and eat their mates after copulating, but I assume that you’re not in favor of that among humans.
Further, in many species copulation amounts to rape. A male will capture and force himself on a female. Or sometimes a group of males will do it. I also assume that you’re not in favor of that among human beings.
The fact is that humans, of all the creatures on earth, are rational beings aware of the moral dimension of their actions. For this reason alone (and there are other reasons), you cannot point to the existence of something in the animal kingdom and say that it is therefore justified among humans as well.
The audience really responded to this. The black widow line alone got a huge laugh. I think even people on the other side of the issue were laughing. After the point was made, there was a big round of applause in acknowledgement of its force.
There was no judging of the debate and no announcement of the winning side, but after the event a gentleman from the audience came up to me and said that he overheard some in the audience who were in favor of "gay marriage" saying of me "Man, he’s killing them (the folks on the other side) with these arguments." Perhaps that was one of the ones they were thinking of. . . . (Shrug.)
