Who''s the Bigot? - Learning From Conflicts Over Marriage and Civil Rights Law

In Bigotry, Conscience, and Marriage, the eminent legal scholar Linda McClain traces the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience across a set of debates relating to both marriage and antidiscrimination law. In the process, she demonstrates the contested nature of the term 'bigotry' along with its complex ties to the concept of conscience. By teasing out the historical dimensions of the arguments surrounding marriage and antidiscrimination law and demonstrating how the motive-content divide structures such debates, McClain makes a novel contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religious liberty and discrimination in American life.

List of contents

• Chapter 1. Who's the Bigot? Puzzles about Bigotry


• Chapter 2. From "The Bigot in Our Midst" to "Good People" with Hidden Biases: The Scientific Study of Prejudice


• Chapter 3. Interfaith Marriage as a Protest Against Bigotry?: Debates in the 1950s and 1960s


• Chapter 4. "You are Waging a Fight of Morality and Conscience:" Competing Theologies of Segregation and Integration 144


• Chapter 5. "Our Spirit Is Not Narrow Bigotry": Debating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and "Legislating Morality"


• Chapter 6. Prejudice, Moral Progress, and Not Being "On the Wrong Side of History": The Legacy of Loving for the Right to Marry


• Chapter 7. "Sincere Believers," "Bigots," or "Superstitious Fools"?: Motives and Morality in the Supreme Court's Gay Rights Cases


• Chapter 8. "This Isn't 1964 Anymore"-Or Is It? Competing Appeals to the Civil Rights Past in Present Controversies over "Religious Liberty versus LGBT Rights"


• Chapter 9. Conclusion: Learning Bigotry's Lessons

About the author

Linda C. McClain is the Robert Kent Professor at Boston University School of Law. She also teaches in BU's Kilachand Honors College. An internationally known scholar, she has written about marriage, family law, civil rights law, gender equality and law, feminist legal theory, and law and religion. She has held fellowships at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and the Safra Center at Harvard University. Her books include The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility, Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (with James E. Fleming), Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship (co-edited with Joanna Grossman and cited in the credits for On the Basis of Sex), and What Is Parenthood? Contemporary Debates About the Family. A graduate of Oberlin College, she has an M.A. from University of Chicago Divinity School, a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and an LL.M. from NYU School of Law.

Summary

Historically, critics of interracial, interfaith, and most recently same-sex marriage have invoked conscience and religious liberty to defend their objections, and often they have been accused of bigotry. Although denouncing and preventing bigotry is a shared political value with a long history, people disagree over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This is evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is intolerant political correctness, even bigotry itself.

In Who's the Bigot?, the eminent legal scholar Linda C. McClain traces the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience across a range of debates relating to marriage and antidiscrimination law. Is "bigotry" simply the term society gives to repudiated beliefs that now are beyond the pale? She argues that the differing views people hold about bigotry reflect competing understandings of what it means to be "on the wrong side of history" and the ways present forms of discrimination resemble or differ from past forms. Furthermore, McClain shows that bigotry has both a backward- and forward-looking dimension. We not only learn the meaning of bigotry by looking to the past, but we also use examples of bigotry, on which there is now consensus, as the basis for making new judgments about what does or does not constitute bigotry and coming to new understandings of both injustice and justice.

By examining charges of bigotry and defenses based on conscience and religious belief in these debates, Who's the Bigot? makes a novel and timely contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religious liberty and discrimination in American life.

Additional text

At a time when public discourse is so charged, and the label "bigot" carries enormous emotional and psychological weight, Linda McClain helpfully unpacks the legal provenance of this fraught term. Drawing on a diverse range of contexts - from interracial marriage to the present debate over conscience exemptions - McClain considers what it means, as a matter of law and culture, to characterize someone (and their actions) as bigoted. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand our polarized society and how we got here.

Product details

• Authors: Linda C. McClain, Linda C. (Professor of Law Mcclain, McClain Linda C.
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 22.04.2020
• EAN: 9780190877200
• ISBN: 978-0-19-087720-0
• No. of pages: 304
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; USA, Human rights & civil liberties law, LAW / Constitutional, LAW / Civil Law, LAW / Family Law / Marriage, United States of America, USA, Social Law, Law: Human rights and civil liberties, Social law and Medical law