This house believes that children need heterosexual parents:
A packed and glorious debate.Though not one whose outcome was ever in question – as opener James Dray puts it, ‘we live in Oxford; everyone’s gay’ – you might expect the Proposition to muster a more forceful argument than that children might get teased a little at school. Alas, they do not, leaving the evening void of any real intellectual titillation. Luckily, the debate’s aesthetic merits more than compensated.
Dray, clearly not believing his own argument, serves up ten minutes of charming banter before adopting his serious voice, and then it all goes tepid and tenuous. He did at least trot out the line ‘some of my best friends are gay’ with superb irony, speculate on Tryl and Omkar’s ‘exquisitely dressed’ hypothetical progeny and introduce the terms ‘rimming’ and ‘fisting’ to the debating chamber.
Opposition opener Wan also amuses, but is incisive along with it; like a whippet armed with a rapier, he plays on personal emotions with aplomb and carries all before him. This lad will go far.
Archdeacon Norman Russell favours the rhetorical tactic of attrition, and subjects the floor to a long and dreary siege. Maybe he hopes disease will break out in the opposition ranks – the coughing certainly becomes more widespread. Rev. Gaston answers with a staccato delivery like the bursts of a machine gun across an abandoned battlefield. And the battle is certainly over.
The audience subjects Stephen Green to an immature but effective sally of interruptions; Holmes and Truss deliver sound and sober speeches in opposition; Edward Leigh MP makes up in fist-clenching and citing ‘our heart of hearts’ as a legitimate statistical source, what he lacks by way of a rational thought process. A decisive victory for the opposition, with many audience members moved by the eloquence of the arguments delivered
Adoption crises; rafts of statistics; UN conventions; the opposition have all the points, but what makes this debate so one-sided is their utter conviction. Future speakers take note: believing your own rhetoric really does make a difference.
