The Most Frequently Heard Answer: McCain supports states rights and believes that communities should be the ones to make that decision.

-- In a debate between the College Democrats and Republican. Read on for the full recap.

On Oct 16th, Queer Awareness Month board hosted a debate between the College Republicans and Democrats regarding the views of both parties' presidential candidates on queer rights. The Republican started things up with an impressive opening statement when one of them claimed that as a homosexual male, he saw reason to support the Republican platform on gay rights. The Democrats had a weak opening that consisted of a list of their views and an ineffective attempt to put down the Republican opening statement but in general had no theme that strung the ideas along in a logical manner.

Questions were answered in a fairly predictable manner, until one audience member asked something along the lines of:

"Obama refuses to use the term 'marriage' when referring to the union of a gay couple. If this is because 'marriage' is a religious term, then which religion gets to define what 'marriage' is?"

The Democrats struggled to answer it and ended up essentially circumscribing it; at which point an audience member (probably the one who wrote the question) rephrased the question and demanded an answer. The whole room laughed when neither party was able to really answer the question.

This is not to say that the Republicans were very impressive past the opening statement; their overarching theme was "John McCain supports states rights." They tried to apply it to every question, but weren't as successful as they had hoped. In particular when asked how McCain could still support "Don't Ask Don't Tell" when many very capable servicemen were dismissed for admitting to being homosexual during a time of war when our military is so lacking in enlistment, they were unable to find a semi-convincing response.

All in all, this event was a B/B+. None of the answers were really surprising, but it was a well run event that provided (probably unintentionally) quite a few good laughs and it was a great idea for the Queer Awareness Month Board to host a debate that tied queer rights to the presidential election in a successful effort to raise awareness about LGBT issues in our society. Now if only they didn't try to squeeze in announcements about at least a dozen upcoming events in the end (which was far too fast and too many in number for anyone to pick up) ...