Generally speaking it’s not worth it.
You can get a zinger in now and then, but you have to be really crafty about it. For example, when talking about women in the military:
DON”T: “Millions of men have died in wars defending women and children… you can talk to me about equality of the sexes when the body count of female soldiers reaches 500,000.”
DO: “I don’t care what anyone else says, it would be an HONOR for me to fight and die alongside the women of this country to defend the children of this land from foreign aggression.”
Another example when discussing school vouchers:
DON’T: “Public schools are terrible and citizens who pay into them but who do not wish to use them should be given money back by the government to help educate their children as they please.”
DO: “The idea that some people think they can get the privileges of using public money for their own personal benefit is horridly unethical. If public funds are to be collected to provide a public good, then the public has a right to decide how those funds will be disbursed. If a person wants the right to choose for themselves, they should take the responsibility of paying for that choice.”
Another example when discussing illegal alien migrant workers:
DON’T: “Millions of people are illegally flooding across our southern border each year, committing crimes, absorbing resources and sending money off to a foreign country.”
DO: “Keeping migrant workers in a state of legal limbo in order to pay them low wages for back-breaking work is an offense to human rights akin to slavery. We should either grant them all citizenship so that they can earn a $15 an hour minimum wage and enjoy all of the legal protections that american workers doing the same jobs would enjoy or we should escort them back to their home countries so that they can be with their spouses and children who love and need them… then we can aid them as they work hard to fight violence and corruption and improve the economic status of their home land. To maintain the status quo or treat them like half-citizens is cruel and selfish and reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws of the reconstruction era South.”
In other words, take their argument and re-state it in the positive to an extreme such that you make THEM look like racist, sexist assholes if they don’t agree.
It’s great fun to have that school voucher discussion and they finally agree with the idea of the right of society to decide how to spend public funds until they realize you could just as well be talking about public funding for health care and abortion and you watch them try to perform the mental gymnastics that are going to let them claim the right to use public funds to kill unborn children despite what they just said about the public’s rights. I love triggering cognitive dissonance.
