Arguing a Position
Overview
Comparing and contrasting ideas in essay form is something you will do throughout your academic
career. Many of you will have had some practice with this essay mode at some point. Perhaps you have
compared the works of two authors such as Toni Morrison and bell hooks, or maybe you have compared
and contrasted two advertisements for health foods. I am sure many of you have had to argue a position in
light of a current controversy such as same sex marriage, immigration, or universal health care. The
engine that makes many of these arguments fun is the comparing and contrasting of different points of
view, and usually the different authors and articles that express such views. So see our next assignment as
a classic standard in academic writing and civic discourse, in which you argue your opinion in a logical
and measured way that includes considering the views of others.
The Assignment
Compose a 4 to 5-page essay where you compare and contrast the ideas of two of the authors we will read
between September 27th and October 18h. (You may use more sources in your essay if you desire.) Be
sure to end your essay arguing for which author you feel has the more/most important ideas about the
topic and its value in the world today.
Composing Advice: Part One
This essay requires that you read your sources carefully. We will of course discuss them in class, but you
will still need to go through them carefully on your own. After considering the essays, you must choose at
least two to work with at length. If you're uncertain, you can always run a few choices by me to make
sure they will work. We may also spend time in class discussing our choices.
Next, read and annotate the essays carefully and compose a one or two page summary or “think sheet" on
what you feel are the most important aspects of each essay. Hopefully you will be able to see at least three
or four main ideas the author offers. Try to distill these to paraphrases or use citation to nail down
specifics. You should also be thinking about which author/essay you find the most persuasive and reasons
why you think so (which will end your essay).
Composing Advice: Part Two
Start drafting your essay by introducing your overall topic, and how you see it take shape in the readings.
You may briefly mention the authors and titles of the essays here. I suggest also signposting your major
ideas, if not offering a thesis right away to guide your reader.
Composing the body of your essay should involve a comparing and contrasting of several shared ideas
between the authors. For example, if your authors discuss how powerful gender roles are in society in
general, you should offer their views and decide whether they agree or disagree, and in what key ways.
You should try to find several areas of overlap where the authors can be compared. For example, if we
continue the gender role essay mentioned above: do they both view family values in the same way? Is
same sex marriage leveling the level playing field in America? Does the law and government offer the
same to all? The list goes on and on. If you are having trouble here, see me. I will also check your rough
draft to make sure you are doing enough here to persuade the reader.
Finally, end your essay deciding which author does the best job overall—and why-in terms of
persuading you and the general reader. What values and arguments do they use that ultimately set them
apart from the rest?
Source Use
Again, your essay must use
at least two sources (though you may use more). Be sure to cite or paraphrase
from each source to make things clear for the reader. Assume your reader has not read the sources. Use
MLA style when citing and paraphrasing.
Nuts and Bolts
The minimum length is 4 full pages (not including your Works Cited).
You must cite two of the essays we will read between September 27th and October 18th.
Please bring a rough draft to class the day before the essay is due for our Writing Workshop.
Remember to use proper MLA format for all citations and references.
Remember to follow the assignment guidelines in your syllabus.
The Final Draft is due October 18th (for MW classes) and October 20th (for MWF classes).
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at jdlee@suffolk.edu.
Good Luck!
Hight America
253
you
sout
to
myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I
thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was
a blank. I simply didn't know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live
with. I knew one thing only: I couldn't be like my dad. For some reason, I knew
somewhere deep down that I couldn't have a marriage like my parents.
on
d-
It's hard to convey what that feeling does to a child. In retrospect, it was a 2
sharp, displacing wound to the psyche. At the very moment you become aware of
sex and emotion, you simultaneously know that for you, there is no future cou-
pling, no future family, no future home. In the future, I would be suddenly exiled
from what I knew: my family, my friends, every household on television, every end
to every romantic movie I'd ever seen. My grandmother crystallized it in classic
and slightly cruel English fashion: “You're not the marrying kind," she said. It was
embrace it. “No, I'm not," I replied. “I like my freedom.”
one of those things that struck a chord of such pain, my pride forced me to
This wasn't a lie. But it was a dodge, and I knew it. And when puberty struck 3
and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling-
both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic
that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concoct-
ing some public veneer to hide a private shame. It was like getting into an elevator
you were expecting to go up, the doors closing, and then suddenly realizing you
were headed down a few stories. And this was when the future went black for me,
when suicide very occasionally entered my mind, when my only legitimate passion
was getting A grades, because at that point it was all I knew how to do. I stayed away
from parties; I didn't learn to drive; I lost contact with those friends whose interest
suddenly became girls; and somewhere in me, something began to die.
They call it the happiest day of your life for a reason. Getting married is often the 4
hinge on which every family generation swings open. In my small-town life, it was far
more important than money or a career or fame. And I could see my grandmother's
point: the very lack of any dating or interest in it, the absence of any intimate relation-
ships, or of any normal teenage behavior, did indeed make me seem just a classic
loner. But I wasn't. Because nobody is. "In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life
lived according to love," as the poet Philip Larkin put it, as well as the fear of never
being loved. That, as Larkin added, nothing cures. And I felt, for a time, incurable.
You can have as many debates about gay marriage as you want, and over the last 5
22 years of campaigning for it, I've had my share. You can debate theology, and the
divide between church and state, the issue of procreation, the red herring of polyg-
amy, and on and on. But what it all really comes down to is the primary institution of
love. The small percentage of people who are gay or lesbian were born, as all humans
are, with the capacity to love and the need to be loved. These things, above every-
thing, are what make life worth living. And unlike every other minority, almost all of
us grew up among and part of the majority, in families where the highest form of that
love was between our parents in marriage. To feel you will never know that, never
feel that, is to experience a deep psychic wound that takes years to recover from. It is
to become psychologically homeless. Which is why, I think, the concept of “coming
out" is not quite right. It should really be called “coming home.
254
Andr
6
who
joy
son
dar
ha
со
be
In the end, I had to abandon my home in order to find it again and know the
place for the first time. I left England just after my 21st birthday for America and its
simple foundational promise: the pursuit of happiness. And I gave myself permis
sion to pursue it. I will never forget the moment I first kissed another man; it was as
if a black-and-white movie suddenly turned into color. I will never forget the first
time I slept next to another man—or rather tried to sleep. Never for a moment did!
actually feel or truly believe any of this was wrong, let alone an “intrinsic evil, as my
strict Catholicism told me that it was. It was so natural, so spontaneous, so joyous, it
the first time as an adult, all that brittleness of the gay adolescent, all that white
could no more be wrong than breathing. And as I experienced intimacy and love for
knuckled embarrassment, all those ruses and excuses and dark, deep depressions
And that is why marriage equality is, to my mind, the distillation of America. If
you're a heterosexual reading this, have you ever considered for a millisecond that
your right to pursue happiness did not include your right to marry the person you
love? And that is why, over the centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the
right to marry for everyone, citizen or even traveler, as a core, inalienable right,
W
lifted. Yes, this was happiness. And America for me will always represent it.
1
1
7
on death
bestowed by the Declaration of Independence itself. The court
has ruled that the
right to marry precedes the Bill of Rights; it has decided that prisoners
row have a right to marry, even if they can never consummate it. It has ruled that
no limitations may be put on it for anyone-deadbeat dads, multiple divorcees
,
felons, noncitizens. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1959 that “the right to marry whoever
one wishes is an elementary human right..... Even political rights
, like the right to
vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to
the inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' pro-
claimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home
and marriage unquestionably belongs.” And, of course, after a long struggle, inter-
racial marriage was finally declared a constitutional right, in perhaps the most
sweeping ruling ever, with the court declaring that civil marriage was one of the
"basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Barack
Obama is a historic American figure not because he is black, but because he is the
son of a black father and a white mother. He is the living embodiment of the pur-
suit of happiness that marriage represented.
I still didn't think it would ever happen to me. I thought I was too emotionaly
damaged, my emotions and sexuality severed by all those years of loneliness and
arrested emotional development. I thought my heart had too much scar tissue,
and I could live my life well enough with just friendship and occasional sexual
encounters or dates. But when I first set eyes on my husband, I knew I had lucked
out. Some things you simply know. And when we finally got married, a few years
later, and our mothers walked us down the makeshift garden aisle, and my sister
gave the reading through tears, and one of our beagles howled through the vows,
and my father put his arms around me and hugged, I did not hear civilization
crumble. I felt a wound being healed. It is a rare privilege to spend your adult life
fighting for a right that was first dismissed as a joke, only finally to achieve it in Six
8
states and Washington, D.C. But how much rarer to actually stumble upon someone
254
Andr
6
who
joy
son
dar
ha
со
be
In the end, I had to abandon my home in order to find it again and know the
place for the first time. I left England just after my 21st birthday for America and its
simple foundational promise: the pursuit of happiness. And I gave myself permis
sion to pursue it. I will never forget the moment I first kissed another man; it was as
if a black-and-white movie suddenly turned into color. I will never forget the first
time I slept next to another man—or rather tried to sleep. Never for a moment did!
actually feel or truly believe any of this was wrong, let alone an “intrinsic evil, as my
strict Catholicism told me that it was. It was so natural, so spontaneous, so joyous, it
the first time as an adult, all that brittleness of the gay adolescent, all that white
could no more be wrong than breathing. And as I experienced intimacy and love for
knuckled embarrassment, all those ruses and excuses and dark, deep depressions
And that is why marriage equality is, to my mind, the distillation of America. If
you're a heterosexual reading this, have you ever considered for a millisecond that
your right to pursue happiness did not include your right to marry the person you
love? And that is why, over the centuries, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the
right to marry for everyone, citizen or even traveler, as a core, inalienable right,
W
lifted. Yes, this was happiness. And America for me will always represent it.
1
1
7
on death
bestowed by the Declaration of Independence itself. The court
has ruled that the
right to marry precedes the Bill of Rights; it has decided that prisoners
row have a right to marry, even if they can never consummate it. It has ruled that
no limitations may be put on it for anyone-deadbeat dads, multiple divorcees
,
felons, noncitizens. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1959 that “the right to marry whoever
one wishes is an elementary human right..... Even political rights
, like the right to
vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to
the inalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' pro-
claimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home
and marriage unquestionably belongs.” And, of course, after a long struggle, inter-
racial marriage was finally declared a constitutional right, in perhaps the most
sweeping ruling ever, with the court declaring that civil marriage was one of the
"basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Barack
Obama is a historic American figure not because he is black, but because he is the
son of a black father and a white mother. He is the living embodiment of the pur-
suit of happiness that marriage represented.
I still didn't think it would ever happen to me. I thought I was too emotionaly
damaged, my emotions and sexuality severed by all those years of loneliness and
arrested emotional development. I thought my heart had too much scar tissue,
and I could live my life well enough with just friendship and occasional sexual
encounters or dates. But when I first set eyes on my husband, I knew I had lucked
out. Some things you simply know. And when we finally got married, a few years
later, and our mothers walked us down the makeshift garden aisle, and my sister
gave the reading through tears, and one of our beagles howled through the vows,
and my father put his arms around me and hugged, I did not hear civilization
crumble. I felt a wound being healed. It is a rare privilege to spend your adult life
fighting for a right that was first dismissed as a joke, only finally to achieve it in Six
8
states and Washington, D.C. But how much rarer to actually stumble upon someone
lage Is Good for Straight America
255
someone just like I was as a kid will be able to look to the future now and not see
9
enige
who could make it a reality. And to have it happen to me in my own lifetime!
This
joy is compounded, deepened, solidified by the knowledge that somewhere,
darkness—but the possibility of love and home. That, I realized, was really what I
had been fighting for two decades: to heal the child I had once been—and the
begged for a model of commitment and responsibility and love.
countless children in the present and future whose future deserved, needed,
And that is why it has been such a tragedy that conservatives decided this
was a battle they were determined to fight against, an advance they were dedi-
cated to reversing. It made no sense to me. Here was a minority asking for
responsibility and commitment and integration. And conservatives were deter-
mined to keep them in isolation, stigmatized and kept on an embarrassing,
unmentionable margin, where gays could be used to buttress the primacy of het-
erosexuality
. We were for them merely a drop shadow for heterosexuality. What
they could not see was that the conservative tradition of reform and inclusion, of
social change through existing institutions, of the family and personal responsibility,
all led inexorably toward civil marriage for gays.
Yes, the main stumbling block was religion. But we were not talking of reli- 10
gious marriage and were more than eager to insist, as in New York state, on the
inviolable religious freedom of churches, mosques, and synagogues to retain their
bans on gay marriage. We were talking about civil marriage—and in that respect,
religious tradition had long since ceased to apply. Civil divorce changed marriage
far more drastically for far more people than allowing the small percentage who
were excluded to be included. And no one doubted an atheist's right to marry,
outside of any church or any religion, just as no one doubted the marriages of
childless couples, or infertile ones. In fact, every single argument against marriage
equality for gays collapsed upon inspection. And when the data showed that in the
era of gay marriage, straight marriage had actually strengthened somewhat, di-
vorce rates had declined, and marriages lasted longer, even those who worried
about unintended consequences conceded that the argument was essentially over.
And that is why it remains so appropriate that George W. Bush's solicitor general,
Ted Olson, would lead the legal fight against Proposition 8 in California; that a
Reagan-appointed judge, Anthony Kennedy, would be the foremost Supreme Court
justice affirming gay and lesbian equality, and that in Albany, in the end, the win-
ning votes came from Republicans who voted their conscience.
Of course this is new and not so new. For a long time, gays and lesbians 11
braver than I was were effectively married and lived together, risking violence
and opprobrium and isolation. For decades these bonds existed, and we knew of
them even if we never spoke of them. I saw them up close as a young man in the
darkest years of the AIDS plague. I saw spouses holding their dying husbands,
cradling them at the hour of their death, inserting catheters, cleaning broken
bodies, tending to terrified souls. This proved beyond any doubt for me that gay
$$ prie
intek
I the
20
de
couples were as capable of as much love and tenacity and tenderness and fidelity
as heterosexual couples. And when I heard their bonds denigrated or demonized,
dismissed or belittled, the sadness became a kind of spur. For so long, so much
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