You know, in retrospect, having gay marriage as a debate topic when I was the only openly gay kid in class was SUPER WEIRD. Imagine if you walked into AP Gov and your teacher pointed at you like, “I don’t think Brian should have health insurance because he sucks. Discuss?”
God I swear, debates like those were terrifying for me when I was younger, especially since I live in a pretty conservative area. Like, 10th grade, walking into your history class ready to learn what minimal shit they teach you about the civil rights movement, and the teacher opens up saying “Who here believes in gay rights?”
You timidly raise your hand, mostly without thinking, and notice you’re the only one. Everyones staring, and suddenly it feels like the walls have eyes too, the whole room is suffocating and it feels like everything is closing in on you. You successfully outed yourself as a supporter, which means you’re gay by the standards of every bigot in the class.
The teacher looks around momentarily, seeing no other hands raised, before looking back to you and saying, “Well, ____, not everybody agrees with you, and thats okay,” before going into a rant about how expecting everybody to support human rights for gay people is like communisim.
Your face is red, the class is whispering, and suddenly you feel like the floodgates behind your eyes are going to let loose. You’ve been called out in class, basically outed to people who have every chance to make your highschool years miserable, and then refused the opportunity to debate your stance because nobody else would back you up and if they did, it might as well be communism by your teachers standards. This happened to me. Every word of it, in real life.
I get kids need to sharpen their debate skills, they need to be able to argue things, but if teachers could stop using somebody elses rights as a nifty debate topic that’d be great. Its alienating, its terrifying, and its dangerous to the people it directly affects, because they could be sitting there in your class.
