DEBATE ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE TO BE TOPIC OF NOV. 9 PRESIDENT'S LECTURE SERIES

Conservative legal scholar Dwight G. Duncan and author Richard D. Mohr will debate the controversial issue of same-sex marriage Thursday, Nov. 9, as part of the Old Dominion University President's Lecture Series.

"Who Should Be Allowed to Marry: The Same-Sex Marriage Debate" will be presented at 8 p.m. in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Duncan, a professor at the Southern New England School of Law, is one of the nation's leading conservative authorities on legal ethics and constitutional law. He has written extensively about First Amendment rights, euthanasia and same-sex marriage, and has participated in many legal debates on gay and lesbian rights.

A practicing member of the Supreme Court of the United States Bar, Duncan is the principal co-author of the Supreme Court briefs on the prevailing side of "Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Organization," in which the court ruled that forcing a veteran's group to include a gay faction in its yearly St. Patrick's Day parade violated the First Amendment.

Duncan holds degrees from Harvard University, Georgetown University Law School and the Roman Athenaeum of the Holy Cross in Rome, Italy.

Mohr, author of "A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights" and one of America's foremost gay thinkers, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. In 1988, he published "Gays/Justice," a book documenting gay public policy issues, and his "Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies," raised national furor in the literary world when almost two dozen publishers refused to print it due to homoerotic representations.

Mohr lectures frequently on topics ranging from anti-gay violence, domestic partnership issues and the implementation of nondiscrimination policies for gays in the workplace.

For more information about the President's Lecture Series, call 683-3116.