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BIGOTRY, PROPHECY, RELIGION, AND THE RACE ANALOGY IN MARRIAGE AND CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLES: RESPONDING TO COMMENTARIES ON WHO'S THE BIGOT? - Who's the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law. By Linda C. McClain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $39.95 (cloth); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780190877200.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2021

Linda C. McClain
Linda C. McClain*
Affiliation:
Robert Kent Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law
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Keywords

bigotrycivil rights lawmarriageprejudiceLGBTQ rightsracismreligious liberty
Type
Book Review Symposium: Who's the Bigot?
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , August 2021 , pp. 358 - 369
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

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References

1 Chambers, Henry L. Jr., “Who's the Bigot? The Book Matters but the Question Does Not,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).

2 Velte, Kyle C., “Lessons for LGBT Rights Advocates from Who's the Bigot,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).

3 Kaveny, M. Cathleen, “Reason, Feeling, Religion, and Bigotry,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).

4 Robin Fretwell Wilson, Aylin Cakan, and Marie-Joe Noon, “From Bigotry to Tolerance,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021) (this issue).

5 Wilson, Cakan, and Noon, “From Bigotry to Tolerance.”

6 Kaveny, “Reason, Feeling, Religion, and Bigotry.”

7 Kaveny.

8 Kaveny.

9 Quoting Charles Kenzie Steele, “The Tallahassee Bus Protest Story,” in Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965, ed. Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, 2 vols. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006–2014), 2:73–79, at 77. In Who's the Bigot?, I also discuss how both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his teacher, Dr. Benjamin Mays, stressed that segregation “scars the soul of both the segregator and the segregated” (92–93, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., “Stride toward Freedom,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington [New York: Harper One, 1986], 417–90, at 478; cf. Benjamin E. Mays, “The Church Amidst Ethnic and Racial Tensions,” in Houck and Dixon, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1965, 1:55–64, at 62).

10 Kaveny, “Reason, Feeling, Religion, and Bigotry.”

11 Kaveny, quoting Merriam-Webster, s.v. “bigot (n.),” accessed July 13, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot.

12 Kaveny.

13 Kaveny.

14 Kaveny.

15 Wilson, Cakan, and Noon, “From Bigotry to Tolerance.”

16 Kaveny, “Reason, Feeling, Religion, and Bigotry.”

17 Wilson, Cakan, and Noon, “From Bigotry to Tolerance.”

18 Wilson, Cakan, and Noon, quoting Cicily Bennion, “#ToleranceMeans That You've Taken the First Step towards Loving Someone Different from You,” Tolerance Means Dialogues, June 17, 2019, https://www.tolerancemeans.com/essaylist/2019/6/17/cicily-bennion-graduate-brigham-young-university.

19 Fulton et al. v. City of Philadelphia, 922 F.3d 140 (3d Cir. 2019), rev'd, 141 S. Ct. 1868 (2021).

20 Wilson, Cakan, and Noon, “From Bigotry to Tolerance.”

21 Chambers, “Who's the Bigot? The Book Matters but the Question Does Not.”

22 Chambers.

23 Quoting Haywood N. Hill, “This I Believe,” in Houck and Dixon, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1:405–07, at 406 (emphasis added in Who's the Bigot?).

24 Quoting Charles P. Bowles, “A Cool Head and a Warm Heart (Luke 10:25–37),” in Houck and Dixon, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1:31–36, at 34.

25 Velte, “Lessons for LGBT Rights Advocates from Who's the Bigot.”

26 Chambers, “Who's the Bigot? The Book Matters but the Question Does Not.”

27 Chambers.

28 Quoting Brief for Appellants at 24–25, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) (No. 395) (internal citations omitted).

29 Quoting W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 81.

30 Kahn, “Seeing Racism in Real Time,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021) (this issue).

31 Quoting Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 664 (2015).

32 Kahn, “Seeing Racism in Real Time.”

33 Kahn, quoting David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker, 2009), 112.

34 Dyer, Justin Buckley, “Bigotry, Time, and Moral Progress,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).

35 Dyer, “Bigotry, Time, and Moral Progress.”

36 Dyer.

37 Dyer.

38 Kahn, “Seeing Racism in Real Time.”

39 Kahn.

40 Velte, “Lessons for LGBT Rights Advocates from Who's the Bigot?” In Who's the Bigot?, I offer historian Peggy Pascoe's comment that shortly after Loving v. Virginia, there was a national “forgetting” of the “three-century-long history of bans on interracial marriage” (139, quoting Pascoe, Peggy, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 292Google Scholar).

41 Velte, “Lessons for LGBT Rights Advocates from Who's the Bigot?”

42 Velte (emphasis Velte's).

43 Quoting Brenner v. Scott, 999 F. Supp. 2d 1278, 1281 (N.D. Fla. 2014).

44 Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644, 741–42 (2015) (Alito, J., dissenting).

45 Josh Blackman, “Video and Transcript of Justice Alito's’ Keynote Address to the Federalist Society,” Volokh Conspiracy, Reason, November 12, 2020, https://reason.com/volokh/2020/11/12/video-and-transcript-of-justice-alitos-keynote-address-to-the-federalist-society/.

46 936 F.3d 429 (6th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, Davis v. Ermold, 141 S. Ct. 3 (2020).

47 Davis, 141 S. Ct. at 4.

48 Davis, 141 S. Ct. at 3.

49 Davis, 141 S. Ct. at 3–4.

50 Quoting Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm'n, 138 S. Ct. 1719, 1727 (2018).

51 Linda C. McClain, “Religious Liberty Exemptions for Government Contractors,” interview by Kimberly Miragliuolo, The Record, July 1, 2021, https://www.bu.edu/law/record/articles/2021/religious-liberty-for-government-contractors/. See also Linda C. McClain, “The Fulton v. City of Philadelphia Oral Argument: Interracial Marriage as a Constitutional Lodestar—Or Third Rail?—in Reasoning about Religiously-Motivated Discrimination,” Balkinization (blog), November 17, 2020, https://balkin.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-fulton-v-city-of-philadelphia-oral.html.

52 Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 141 S. Ct. 1868, 1878 (2021).

53 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1878–79.

54 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1882, quoting Masterpiece Cakeshop, 138 S. Ct. at 1727 (brackets in Fulton).

55 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1882.

56 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1877.

57 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1925 (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment).

58 Fulton, 141 S. Ct. at 1925. See my further analysis of the implications of Fulton: Linda C. McClain, “Is There a ‘Center’ to Hold in Supreme Court Jurisprudence on Religious Liberty and LGBTQ Rights?,” Berkley Forum, July 26, 2021, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/is-there-a-center-to-hold-in-supreme-court-jurisprudence-on-religious-liberty-and-lgbtq-rights.

59 Chambers, “Who's the Bigot? The Book Matters but the Question Does Not.”

60 Kahn, “Seeing Racism in Real Time.”

61 Kahn.

62 Allport, W. Gordon, The Nature of Prejudice, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar.

63 See Linda C. McClain, “Why Talk about Bad Actors versus Good People Misses the Problem of Systemic Racism,” OUPblog, June 19, 2020, https://blog.oup.com/2020/06/why-talk-about-bad-actors-versus-good-people-misses-the-problem-of-systemic-racism/.

64 See, for example, Andrea Shalal, “Biden, Harris, Condemn U.S. Racism, Sexism in Blunt Language,” Reuters, March 21, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-racism/biden-harris-condemn-u-s-racism-sexism-in-blunt-language-idUSKBN2BE019; Joseph R. Biden Jr., Executive Order for Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government, January 20, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government/.