Who's the bigot? : learning from conflicts over marriage and civil rights law

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 anyonewho wants to understand our polarized society and how we got here. * Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law, NYU School of Law * Through historical excavation and close readings of primary texts, Linda McClain examines the meaning and use of bigotry over time. By situating us in the thick of past conflicts over equality, McClain shows that views we now repudiate as bigoted were once within the realm of reasonable debate. Her book should be a warning for proponents of equality law today: Labeling one's opponents as bigots may obscure, rather than illuminate, connections between past and presentstruggles. Instead, by unearthing the similarities in justifications for inequality over time, McClain leaves us better able to appreciate the relationship between struggles for racial equality and struggles for LGBT equality. * Douglas NeJaime, Anne Urowsky Professor of Law, Yale Law School * A must read for those who are interested in seeing the modern social psychological understanding of racism applied to American religion. * Thomas F. Pettigrew, Research Professor of Social Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz * An important and clear-minded book by a leading scholar of law and public policy that explores our evolving understanding of bigotry in the context of debates over gay rights and religious liberty. Deeply illuminating. * Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University * This timely, wide-ranging, and historically detailed work invites us to think more deeply about bigotry - what it is, how it has functioned in various debates over marriage, and how those debates in turn shed light on the reality and rhetoric of bigotry. McClain's book is an invaluable contribution to our perspective on these matters. * John Corvino, author of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination and What's Wrong With Homosexuality?, Dean, Irvin D. Reid Honors College and Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University * McClain provides readers a way to understand the meaning, the boundary, and even the accommodation of bigotry. The book would be of interest not just to legal scholars but also to those studying law from a perspective of political theory, sociology, or history. The scope and depth of McClain's book is impressive and she has a lot to teach her readers. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about society's conflicts over marriage and civilrights law. * Sonu Bedi, author of Private Racism, and Professor in Law and Political Science, Dartmouth College * Linda McClain's book is a meticulously researched and compellingly presented study of moral and political language. She illuminates the different ways in which the term "bigot" has been used in American constitutional law, from the battles over slavery in the nineteenth century to the skirmishes over same sex marriage in the twenty-first. * Cathleen Kaveny, Balkinization blog * Read more...