Friday, October 01, 2010

This saddens me

The November PF topic is "Resolved: An Islamic cultural center should be built near Ground Zero."

This is not acceptable. Regardless of what one thinks of the subject, as responsible adults we should not be putting the students we are educating in the position of arguing against the sincerity of their own religion. Nor, for that matter, should be be putting students we are educating in the position of arguing against the sincerity of someone else's religion.

The groundswell against this has already begun. I would imagine that if NFL does not come up with a new topic by the end of the weekend, we will substitute a different topic for the tournaments in November, including the MHL and Bump.

2 comments:

Tom Deal said...

this is a problem with the event, not the topic.

an event that values understanding by lay people and appeals to the lowest common denominator will as a natural consequence create lowest common denominator debates. PF is surely valuable, but this topic is not an isolated incident. it is a symptom of how the event is designed.

the problem of topic selection is something that has been brought up on lddebate.org (obviously not PF), and there is one thread in particular started by Julian Switala in the Theory section that i think touches on some issues of topic selection and improving processes overall.

jim, i'm not familiar with how the PF topic is chosen, perhaps you could elaborate for those of us in the dark.

and i'm confused as to why asking the NFL to change the topic is acceptable. this never happens for any other events (nor would it be acceptable to many people to call for such changes), what makes PF special or what makes this topic so special? in LD we had a church v state topic that i would argue touches on similar sensitive ground and yet no one was offended or deemed it unacceptable. it seems weird to me to unilaterally delink from the sanctioning body. perhaps you could explain what aside from the shallow and ultimately incorrect arguments (no one is going to win rounds arguing islam bad, they're going to win arguments based on far more nuanced concerns, even if those concerns are at heart discriminatory or anti-islam) makes this topic so bad. it doesn't question a religion, it questions a building near a former building.

and obvi i think that the cordoba house should be built, if only to cause a collective aneurysm, but i'd like to hear your thoughts in more detail please.

pjwexler said...

There is ample precedent for tournaments not to use the NFL topic in LD- some regions (and tournaments) do so even today). The NFL sanctions their national tournament and district tournaments only.

There are also several cases of schools refusing to debate national topics. Going WAY back, the service academies and three Nebraska state teachers colleges (perhaps others) refused to debate an intercollegiate debate topic in the 1950s calling for the U.S. to recognize mainland China.

I personally find the topic likely to appeal to bigotry and the rankest form of prejudice. My LD paradigm notes that I will drop any debater who affirmatively and proactively makes racist or sexist arguments (as opposed to arguments that may 'lead' to that), regardless of the the technicalities of the round. So it is easy for me to oppose a topic that is based, at least in large part, on making those arguments.