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- Title
NOAH'S CURSE: HOW RELIGION OFTEN CONFLATES STATUS, BELIEF, AND CONDUCT TO RESIST ANTIDISCRIMINATION NORMS.
- Authors
Eskridge Jr., William N.
- Abstract
Today, many devout Christian fundamentalists support some state discrimination against gay people, on the ground that full equality for gays would mean fewer liberties for themselves. In its recent controversy with a public law school, the Christian Legal Society argued that it was entitled to state subsidies even though it violated the school's antidiscrimination policy. The Society said it excluded only "unrepentant homosexuals "-those gay persons whose "immoral" conduct and degraded status were directly linked to what the Society considered an anti-Christian message. Professor Eskridge demonstrates that the same clash between equality for minorities and liberty for Christian fundamentalists played out in the context of race. Most of today's antigay denominations were generations earlier antiblack as a matter of faith. When people of color sought the end of slavery and, later, apartheid, they were met by arguments that more equal treatment for people of African descent would violate the liberties enjoyed by Christians of European descent. Moreover, religion, society, and the state are mutually constitutive-each influences the others. Thus, advances in racial equality were accompanied and at the same time abetted by the abandonment of racist religious doctrines. Professor Eskridge argues that pro-tolerance religious persons and groups are critical players in the progress of society toward more equal treatment of sexual minorities in the future as well as racial minorities in the past.
- Subjects
HOMOPHOBIA -- Religious aspects; PROTESTANT fundamentalism; HOMOPHOBIA; LAW schools; SEXUAL minorities; RACIAL minorities; EQUALITY
- Publication
Georgia Law Review, 2011, Vol 45, Issue 3, p657
- ISSN
0016-8300
- Publication type
Article