Religious Freedom and Gay Rights

Most of the chapters in this edited volume arose from a conference held at Oxford University and organized by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University. The conference was called Religious Freedom and Equality: Emerging Conflicts in North America and Europe. The result is a fascinating volume with some excellent contributions addressing the nexus between religious freedom and LGBT rights. Throughout the world questions about the relationship between religious freedom and LGBT rights have become more central to rights and rights discourse. This volume addresses these important questions from a variety of perspectives, and it is mostly successful in bringing the reader into the dialogue and expressing the competing positions. Importantly, the authors, while respectful to each other, do not downplay the depth of these issues and how they impact people and institutions at their very core. After all, what makes these issues so controversial and complex is that they go to the heart of autonomy and what it means to be human. There are serious and important rights on both sides. When they conflict, whichever side loses, loses a part of themselves in the eyes of the law, and perhaps in the eyes of society as well.

Autonomy · Gay rights · Human rights · Nexus (standard) · Political science · Politics · Religious freedom · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law