While BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey walked into “Jubilee’s Face Off” against Monte Mader, she was expecting a debate.
But what she got was a “monologue-off.”
She and Mader were each allowed to bring two claims. Her two claims were that Christians must oppose abortion and that Christians cannot affirm same-sex marriage.
Mader’s claims were that America is not and will never be a Christian nation and that the patriarchy, not feminism, is at odds with Christ’s ministry and teaching.
“So four total claims, and there are 16 minutes per claim that we get to go back and forth, and that is split into her eight minutes and my eight minutes,” Stuckey explains, noting that there were also no interruptions allowed in the debate.
“It was really more of a monologue-off. Like it was her monologue, then my monologue. It wasn’t really a back-and-forth,” she explains, noting that the way it was set up made it difficult to respond to any claims.
“They make too many claims in a matter of, say, five minutes that they’re talking. You’ve got to pick and choose what claims you are going to respond to. And never do you have the ability to stop and say, ‘Hang on a second … you just said that, but earlier you said that,’” she says.
In this format, there is no way to “define your terms,” which Stuckey says is the “most important part of any debate.”
In one clip from the debate, her opponent claims that a baby in utero is “not a baby.”
“That’s not me being contrarian. That’s accuracy. Embryo up to the end of eight weeks and then we have a fetus. And I think it’s very important so that we’re actually getting to the facts of the matter,” Mader said.
“Do I have to put myself in harm’s way or risk death in order for this life to be viable? I think you have an absolutely solid argument after viability. But we know that that is not when the bulk of abortions happen,” she continued, adding that “late second and third trimester is almost exclusively for fatal fetal abnormalities, still births, partial miscarriages, and medical emergencies.”
“First of all, fetus is Latin for small child, and so we can get into the semantics of it. It’s all a human being. I mean, just because we call a child a toddler or we call a child a baby doesn’t mean that it’s not a child, doesn’t mean that it’s not a human,” Stuckey responded.
“Viability, extremely arbitrary standard for whether or not a person should be murdered. I mean, we’re not just talking about, OK, is it okay for the dentist to pull a tooth?” she added.
“So as you can see, there are a million things that I could have responded to even in that. I could have responded to the fact that she’s now saying, ‘I have a good argument after viability’ when earlier she said that ‘life doesn’t begin until first breath,’” Stuckey comments.
“I could have addressed this idea that late-term abortion, second and third trimester are only for all of these reasons like the health of the mother, cancer diagnosis. That’s not a reason to abort a child in the second or third trimester,” she continues.
“It’s really easy when someone is spouting a lot of information that might seem factual because they’re very confident to kind of follow them down that trail, but that’s called a red herring. That is making an argument that is actually totally unrelated and irrelevant to the logic and the substance of the main claim,” she adds.
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