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Conscience Protection And Discrimination In The Republican Party Platform And Mississippi's H.B. 1523, Religious Freedom Institute, Linda C. Mcclain Jul 2016

Conscience Protection And Discrimination In The Republican Party Platform And Mississippi's H.B. 1523, Religious Freedom Institute, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Last May, before the Supreme Court issued its landmark opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges,Cornerstone sponsored a symposium on “Responding to Indiana RFRA and Beyond,” which focused on Governor Mike Pence’s swift “fix” of Indiana’s RFRA, after protests and threats of boycotts, to clarify that it would “not create a license to discriminate.” Particularly controversial were provisions protecting the conscience of persons operating for-profit businesses. In that symposium, I observed that public discourse frequently referred back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because “many people relate the current battle over protecting conscience in the context of …


From Outlaw To Outcast To In-Law? Contesting The Perils Of Marriage Equality, Linda C. Mcclain Jan 2016

From Outlaw To Outcast To In-Law? Contesting The Perils Of Marriage Equality, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

I am pleased to offer the opening commentary in this BU Law Review Annex symposium on Professor Katherine Franke’s provocative new book, Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. As previewed by the book’s additional subtitle, “How African Americans and Gays Mistakenly Thought the Right to Marry Would Set Them Free,” Franke aims to provide “cautionary tales” gleaned, or lessons learned, from juxtaposing post-Civil War regulation of the marriages of African Americans freed from slavery with today’s movement for marriage equality for gay men and lesbians.3 Long a skeptic about the gay community’s focus on the goal of marriage—its (in …


Civil Marriage For Same-Sex Couples, "Moral Disapproval," And Tensions Between Religious Liberty And Equality, Linda C. Mcclain Jan 2016

Civil Marriage For Same-Sex Couples, "Moral Disapproval," And Tensions Between Religious Liberty And Equality, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

In the United States and Europe, an increasing emphasis on equality has pitted rights claims against each other, raising profound philosophical, moral, legal, and political questions about the meaning and reach of religious liberty. Nowhere has this conflict been more salient than in the debate between claims of religious freedom, on one hand, and equal rights claims made on the behalf of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, on the other. As new rights for LGBT individuals have expanded in liberal democracies across the West, longstanding rights of religious freedom—such as the rights of religious communities …


Opinion Of Justice Katherine Franke In Obergefell V. Hodges, Katherine M. Franke Jan 2016

Opinion Of Justice Katherine Franke In Obergefell V. Hodges, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Jack Balkin has assembled a group of 9 scholars and advocates to write opinions in the Obergefell v. Hodges case for a forthcoming volume, What Obergefell Should Have Said (Yale University Press 2017). Balkin writes for the majority of the Court and I provide a concurrence along with a short commentary explaining my approach and reasoning. In summary, I conclude that: Laws barring same-sex couples from eligibility for licensure as civil marriages violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they find their origin in and perpetuate notions of heterosexual supremacy, and have the aim and effect …


Wedlocked: The Perils Of Marriage Equality – The Author Meets Her Readers, Katherine M. Franke Jan 2016

Wedlocked: The Perils Of Marriage Equality – The Author Meets Her Readers, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

You write a book and you wonder: “will anyone read it?” This Boston University Law Review Annex Symposium on Wedlocked answers my question. Not only did “someone” read the book, but those “someones” are some of the scholars I admire most, and they took the time and thought to engage Wedlocked’s arguments in this symposium. Thank you to each of the scholars who participated in this symposium, thank you to Professor Linda McClain for inviting their participation, and thank you to James Tobin, the Online Editor for the BU Law Review, for providing a home for this conversation about …