Received from johnteen0@aol.com Sun May 8 22:05:58 1994 My debate speech follows that I did a little while ago. ------- Erwin, John Debate--Block 5 JSA (Junior Statesman Association) April 20, 1994 Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this document in whole or in part in any form, as long as the writer is given credit and no words are modified. Excerpts may be used, but they must not modify the words of the writer. Resolved: That the United States Constitution be amended to prohibit the discrimination of people based on sexual preference. Side: Proponent. Law must be enacted to prohibit the discrimination of people based on sexual orientation in order to set a precedent of equality throughout American society. Legal rights need to support equality among all people in order to influence the attitudes of the rest of our social structure. The Constitution is a defining thread of America. When it systematically sanctions discrimination, it blindly encourages obliterating difference. We must pass this resolution so that one of the roll models of our world can convey the rightful message of equality. This proposed amendment is not a radical heed for special rights. It is simply an attempt to correct the prejudicial injustice of our social paradigm. No one can disagree that hate crimes are an intolerable reflection of mismorality. Even if you dont like sexual minorities, its hard to believe that they deserve physical violation. Hate crimes are tangible evidence of the misunderstanding of difference. How can one justify ascribing violence upon someone just because of who they are? Where does someone get the idea that difference is something so bad that it deserves violent elimination? The Constitution is partly responsible. As a defining element of our morality, the Constitution affects public opinion. By passively approving of discrimination, the Constitution engrains a green light to discriminate in all of us. Everyone is influenced by general consensus. And when something as highly regarded as the Constitution commits injustice, it results in unjust general opinion. General opinion should influence each individual in our society to make the right decisions, not wrong ones. Why do we need Constitutional protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation? After all, the Constitution doesnt specifically discriminate against sexual minorities. There are sodomy laws that come from the idea that sex should be exclusively for propagation, but they apply to people of all sexual orientations. However, these laws have been unequally enforced. For example, in the 1982 Bowers v. Hardwick case challenging Georgias sodomy law, the Supreme Court simply reverted to prejudice on the basing of this decision. Georgias law prohibited all adults from sexual behavior not designed to produce children. Surely the Constitution already contradicts this idea. For instance, what is the legal right to abortion and contraception? Surely these rights undermine the Georgia statute. But instead of examining the full spectrum of the Georgia law, the Supreme Court took the easy, unjust way out. Justice White explicitly stated that the Bowers v. Hardwick case was trying to establish a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. What was really at stake was the larger question of whether the government could constitutionally intrude upon the sexual intimacy of all Americans. The answer to this question, had it been honestly confronted, would surely have been no. It is hard to believe that Georgias law would have survived challenge had it been used to arrest a married couple in the privacy of their bedroom. In fact, the law has never been used against heterosexuals, although it could. It was just convenient for Justice White to avoid the larger question and pretend that the law applied only to homosexuals. This itself is the embodiment of discrimination. Secondly, the powerful homophobic lobbying of many private groups has resulted in the undermining of the civil liberties of non-heterosexuals. This alone warrants this proposed Constitutional amendment. Groups like the Oregon Citizens Alliance have attempted to disallow any legislation that provides any special homosexual rights. This ideal stems from sheer ignorance and homophobia. How is the guarantee of equality to gay Americans a special right? We already know we need it. Just look at the military. If this amendment was passed, surely the policy on gays in the military would be found unconstitutional. Most of the fervor of groups like the OCA come from the idea that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are not a true minority. Hence, these people believe they dont deserve minority protection. But ones sexual orientation is not a private matter. It influences everything in ones life. It even dictates our caste in American society. Our sexuality is not just something that is expressed behind closed doors. It is what makes us real and human. Doesnt everyone deserve to have their humanness guaranteed to be treated the same as everyone elses? Moreover, OCA-esque groups try to validate their platform by saying one chooses to be gay. They say that gays dont deserve minority protection because they chose to be gay. This is an easy thing to say since it is true that ones sexual orientation is not tangible. Its not something everyone can automatically see like your skin color. But its still there and real. People cant regulate who they love. They can choose to label themselves gay or lesbian or bisexual, but they cant choose not to have those feelings. Believe me, Im speaking from personal experience. Before I came out and accepted my sexuality, I would have done almost anything to de-gay myself--even suicide. In fact, it was documented in a 1989 U.S. Government study that approximately 30% of teenage suicides are accountable to the questioning of ones sexuality. How can anyone think we dont deserve protection from discrimination? Societys homophobic general opinions are resulting in genocide. How an it stop if there are no legal precedents to stop it? I believe that sexual orientation really is a misnomer. Rather, I believe that the term affectional orientation is more appropriate. Sexual identity isnt just a matter of whom we have sex with, its the people who we naturally feel affection towards. Therefore, sexual orientation really us as black and white as race. Those who we feel affection towards are defined from the very beginning of ones conception, just as is ones racial identity. Sexual minorities really are a true minority, and they deserve all of the protections everyone else has. The path to equality and the elimination of homophobia is a long and arduous one. The Constitution has a true moral duty to explicitly prohibit discrimination of sexual minorities because it is one of the pinnacles of our virtues. If the pinnacles of our world dont set a good example, how can we expect it to trickle-down to all of the other nuances society (including general consensus). I believe that this proposed amendment is the first step to correcting things like the burgeoning suicide rate of our country. And that is why I ask you to vote for the proponency. Who knows, your vote could save a life. End Speech We live in a world of great diversity where difference should be valued, not shunned. Our world is not something only multicultural, but multisexual as well. We must prevail over the blasphemous human condition that attempts to make everything simple. Our world is something strange and complex that has no limits on subject, including sexuality. And, in many ways, we are slowly adapting to the idea of a weird world. Despite the Supreme Court, there is wider public tolerance of gay people. Yet tolerance is not the same as legal right. Tolerance depends on the goodwill of the majority, while a legal right limits the majority by law. Tolerance can be present in some places and absent in others; law seeks a uniform standard. Tolerance by some is no remedy for discrimination--or even violence--from others; law seeks to establish rights providing enforceable remedies wherever discrimination occurs. Beneath discrimination and intolerance lie fear and fantasy. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis said long ago and in another context, Men feared witches and burned women. Much racial violence, and certainly most violence against gays, has been the result of deeply held personal fears and insecurities of those who engage in such violence--fears about their future, about their status, about their own sexuality. It is the function of law to protect minorities--whether religious, political, racial, or sexual--against such fears when they break out into over acts of discrimination or violence. The struggle for equal rights has always taken place on the frontier of the legal wilderness where liberty meets power. Liberty has claimed much of that wilderness now, but the frontier always lies ahead of us. Constitutional principles may remain invariant, but the process of extending them moves much too slowly. The frontier of liberty may have expanded far beyond where it began. But for those without rights, it always seems somehow on the horizon, just beyond their reach.