Should we protect LGBT students? Circa 1999
Reflections on Debate Team
The year was 1999, and I had found my place in school. I had joined speech and debate, doing what I loved to do best: arguing with people.
I was living in the suburbs of Houston in Texas, and the climate was one of major conservatism. Virginity oaths were very common as were people ready to tell you that you were going to hell because you hadn’t found Christ or because you were Catholic. God help you if you were in Texas and not white, male, heterosexual, and the right kind of Christian.
Homosexuality was still illegal in Texas in 1999
Speech and Debate
In debate, I fell in love with extemporaneous speaking and cross-examination (CX). The only problem with CX is that it required work to put together plans and counter arguments. Being a novice, our wonderful teacher Ms. Hollis had a few main plans to chose from for the debate topic. Typically, there were debate camps during the summer where you worked to build out your bin of files that you would carry from room to room during a tournament.
For the 1999 to 2000 season, the topic was “That the federal government should establish an education policy to significantly increase academic achievement in secondary schools in the United States.” Every single word of that topic was up for grabs.
My partner Jeff and I used three plans the whole year:
- School Vouchers
- LGBT Protections
- Ban Compulsory Education after 10th Grade
We started with school vouchers, and ended with compulsory education, but the majority of the year, we used a plan arguing for LGBT protections.
I leave the term as LGBT because at the time, that was the most encompassing term used. That has expanded quite a bit as the acceptance of different gender norms has become common or rather is becoming more common.
I didn’t realize at the time how controversial this plan was, and only recently reflected on how quickly society has progressed from then until now.
LGBTQ+ Laws
At time, while I knew there was discrimination against gay people, I don’t think I realized it was actually illegal in Texas. A few years prior, my uncle came out, and to me, having an openly gay uncle and his partner was normal. Society seemed abnormal, and I didn’t know much about the laws.
Only a year prior, John Geddes Lawrence Jr. was arrested in his apartment for having sex with another man, and John lived in Harris County which covers most of Houston. He was charged under Texas’s anti-sodomy statute from 1973 that was specifically aimed at banning gay people from being able to be themselves. This case eventually went to the Supreme Court in 2002, and in July 2003, sodomy laws everywhere were overturned.
In the second half of that debate season in 2000, Vermont became the first state to legalize civil unions. It was another 15 years before gay marriage was legal in the US.
In terms of the acceptance of homosexuality, in 1999, 43% of Americans thought homosexual relationships between consenting adults should be illegal. This contrasts 2020, where that number is 24%. For gay marriage in 1999, 62% of American did not think gay marriages should be legal which has dropped to 31% in 2020.
Few issues have swung that quickly in so few years, and while it’s been exciting to see such acceptance for LGBTQ+ community, the full impact of how that affected my friends and I as kids was not clear at the time.
Debate Plan
The LGBT protections plan was pretty unique. I don’t remember anyone else having a similar plan. The premise of the plan is that 10% of the population is LGBT, and they are often bullied in school. By adding protections for them in Title IX, their academic performance would increase.
While we had made it to the semi-finals in one tournament using school vouchers, we didn’t advance beyond the first playoff rounds the rest of the year. I didn’t realize that the reason we didn’t advance in tournaments was probably tied to using this plan. The majority of debates judges were just regular people. There were trained debate judges, so they may have selected someone else above us simply because of the plan we had, but the majority were just locals who had conservative views.
I don’t remember anyone being particularly mean to us about the plan, and I thought based on numbers, it was pretty straight-forward. Most counter-attacks had nothing to do with morality on face-value. They all had to deal with money or states-rights, but really, if anyone uses states rights as a justification for anything, one should always inquire more. States rights was claimed to be the rational for the Civil War so it doesn’t have a great history in being used for honorable causes.
Progress in Other Areas
In seeing how much progress LGBTQ+ rights have come, I’m sure the same could be done for making progress on racism. The progress was made mainly by people, individuals talking to their families. Many people came out to their families, and many people held their families accountable when they say discriminatory or hateful things.
We could do the same thing for racism today. If we held our friends and family accountable to the same level that we did for homosexuality, we could make better progress than we have for the last 20 years. The past two decades have really been successful in gay rights, and that energy could be put forth to ending racism and gender discrimination as well.
Reflecting on speech and debate, I had so much fun. I felt so accepted, enjoyed debating people, and public speaking. I hadn’t imagined I might have done anything to help social justice, but I think we did, at least on a small scale. We brought forth a plan that probably predetermined us to lose, and we continued to do it.
I also wish I had better pictures from then with me in my oversized, 20 year old brown suit.
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Further readings of mine:
A Collection of Espresso Articles
The Responsibility of an Academic Rigor
