In honor of Constitution Day, members of ASU’s Young Democrats and College Republicans participated in a debate Thursday evening on the Downtown campus.
Constitution Day is celebrated Sept. 17, the day the U.S. Constitution was signed and adopted in Philadelphia in 1787.
The main debaters were Christopher Klugman, the vice president of Young Democrats at the West Campus and journalism sophomore Blake Wilson, the president of College Republicans. Wilson is a reporter for State Press TV. Also debating in Wilson’s absence at the beginning of the debate was religious studies senior Matthew Messana.
The debate covered topics from the proposed mosque to be built in New York City, which is a First Amendment issue, to the 14th Amendment and how it relates to illegal immigration.
Even though it was primarily a Constitutional debate, topics relating directly to Arizona were also discussed, including privatizing prisons and the legalization of medical marijuana through Proposition 203.
“We kind of got away from the Constitution to talk about Arizona topics, but they’re topics that need to be discussed,” Klugman said.
On many of the topics — including the 14th Amendment, Proposition 203 and the Rev. Terry Jones’ threatened Quran burning — the Democrat and Republican debaters agreed with each other.
On other topics, including the proposed New York City Mosque, Klugman and Wilson would partially agree with each other.
“[The New York City mosque] makes conversation about the freedom of religion, which we need to talk about,” Klugman said. “This hopefully will stir a bigger conversation about the values of America.”
However, it wasn’t bad that they agreed so often, said Wilson.
“It was a good conversation,” Wilson said. “I liked the fact we weren’t yelling at each other, because we found a lot of agreement on a lot of things.”
Creative writing and theater senior Eichelle Armstrong said the fact that both sides agree on so much forces people to think about the United States’ two-party system in a different way.
Armstrong is a programming assistant and set up the debate to garner more recognition of Constitution Day, a fairly unknown holiday.
First Amendment issues were also discussed as the debaters expressed their views over controlling speech and content on the Internet as it relates to obscenity.
“The Internet is a very hard thing to control,” said Klugman. “You can cancel someone’s website and they come up with a new one five minutes later … I don’t know how you could do it.”
Wilson said the Internet should not be regulated at all, except to protect other people from hate speech and potential stalkers.
“Regulation is such an awful word too, why not use oversight? But as far as actually regulating the [Internet] for everybody in the world, it shouldn’t be regulated at all,” Wilson said.
The hour-long debate covered a wide range of issues and, in the end, all involved were most surprised by how much the two sides agreed.
Klugman said he was “shocked” that the two sides agreed so often.
Despite the small crowd of approximately 10 people, Armstrong said she thought the event was successful.
“The whole point of the debate was really just to educate people about Constitution Day and their Constitution, so from my event planner perspective it was a success,” Armstrong said.
Reach the reporter at connor.radnovich@asu.edu
