Law Commons^™

A Word Of Warning From A Woman: Arbitrary, Categorical, And Hidden Religious Exemptions Threaten Lgbt Rights, Leslie C. Griffin

Scholarly Works

Religious exemptions have already undermined women’s rights. Now exemptions threaten gays and lesbians. The Constitution protected women’s equality and liberty until religious exemptions eroded them. Today, as gays and lesbians stand on the threshold of marriage equality, religious exemptions threaten to diminish their hard-earned constitutional right. For this reason, I argue it is past time to reject the religious exemption theory of religious liberty, which privileges religion over civil and constitutional rights, in favor of neutral laws that govern all. Religious exemptions pervade American law in numerous ways that are harmful to civil rights.

In this essay, I identify three …

Glorious Precedents: When Gay Marriage Was Radical, Michael Boucai

Journal Articles

In the years immediately following the Stonewall riots of June 1969, a period when “gay liberation” rather than “gay rights” described the ambitions of a movement, three marriage cases made their way to and beyond trial: Baker v. Nelson in Minnesota, Jones v. Hallahan in Kentucky, and Singer v. Hara in Washington State. This article offers a detailed account of that early trilogy. Drawing on extensive archival research and on interviews with key players in each case, it shows that, contrary to received wisdom, Stonewall-era marriage litigation was faithful to gay liberation’s radical aspirations. The Baker, Jones, and Singer lawsuits …

Pluralism And Its Perils: Navigating The Tension Between Gay Rights And Religious Expression, Nan D. Hunter

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The conflict between gay equality claims and religious liberty claims permeates debates over marriage equality and LGBT civil rights. Using as its centerpiece a decision that forced Georgetown University to provide benefits for a gay student organization, this article examines both the doctrinal underpinnings of how courts resolve the tension between gay rights and religion and the principles of pluralism that are at stake.

The Georgetown case is rightly understood as an exemplar of judicial minimalism. This article argues that the values of learning things undecided, while real, may be outweighed by lost opportunities for advancing principles that also foster …