Religious freedom and gay rights

About this book

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. The eye of this conflict is the debate over claims of religious freedom, on one hand, and claims of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, on the other. As new rights for LGBT people have expanded in liberal democracies across the West, many advocates of religious freedom claim that their rights - such as the rights of conscience; the rights of parents to impart their religious beliefs to their children; and the liberty to advance religiously-based moral arguments as a rationale for laws - have experienced a corresponding decline. In Religious Freedom and Gay Rights, editors Timothy Samuel Shah, Thomas F. Farr, and Jack Friedman bring together some of the world's leading thinkers on religion, morality, politics, and law to analyze the emerging tensions between religious freedom and gay rights in three geographic regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. The result is a thoughtful inquiry into the legal and moral frameworks that govern tensions between gay rights and religious freedom and the political controversies that these tensions have produced. -- from back cover.