The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, Feb 15, 2010 - Law - 220 pages
The gay rights question is whether the second-class legal status of gay people should be changed. In this book Andrew Koppelman shows the powerful legal and moral case for gay equality, but argues that courts cannot and should not impose it.

The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law offers an unusually nuanced analysis of the most pressing gay rights issues. Does antigay discrimination violate the Constitution? Is there any sound moral objection to homosexual conduct? Are such objections the moral and constitutional equivalent of racism? Must state laws recognizing same-sex unions be given effect in other states? Should courts take account of popular resistance to gay equality? Koppelman sheds new light on all these questions. Sure to upset purists on either side of the debate, Koppelman's book criticizes the legal arguments advanced both for and against gay rights. Just as important, it places these arguments in broader moral and social contexts, offering original, pragmatic, and workable legal solutions.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
1
1 Equal Protection and Invidious Intent
6
2 The Right to Privacy?
35
3 The Sex Discrimination Argument and Objections
53
4 Why Discriminate?
72
5 Choice of Law and Public Policy
94
Why the Defense of Marriage Act Is Unconstitutional
127
The Limitations of the Courts
141
Notes
155
Index
199
Copyright

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Page 145 - That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community...
Page 42 - That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection ; that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.
Page 130 - No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.
Page 10 - Into the review of statutes directed at particular religious ... or national ... or racial minorities . . . ; whether prejudice against discrete and Insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial scrutiny.
Page 36 - The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers...
Page 193 - Such Acts, records and judicial proceedings or copies thereof, so authenticated, shall have the same full faith and credit in every court within the United States and its Territories and Possessions as they have by law or usage in the courts 'of such State, Territory or Possession from which they are taken.
Page 36 - The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.
Page 74 - ... we argue from the course of nature, and infer a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed* and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle, which is both uncertain and useless. It is uncertain ; because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless; because our knowledge of this cause being derived entirely from the course of nature, we can never, according to the rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause with any new inference,...
Page 91 - I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

About the author (2010)

Andrew Koppelman is an associate professor of law and political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality.

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