Religious Freedom and Gay Rights: Emerging Conflicts in the United States and Europe - Paperback

by Timothy Shah (Editor), Thomas Farr (Editor), Jack Friedman (Author)

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. Nowhere has this conflict been more salient than in the debate between claims of religious freedom, on one hand, and equal rights claims made on the behalf of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, on the other. As new rights for LGBT individuals have expanded in liberal democracies across the West, longstanding rights of religious freedom -- such as the rights of religious communities to adhere to their fundamental teachings, including protecting 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 suffered a corresponding decline. Timothy Samuel Shah, Thomas F. Farr, and Jack Friedman's volume,

Author Biography

TS: Associate Director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University; Visiting Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University; co-author of God's Century (Norton, 2011)TF: Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and International Affairs at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University JF: Research assistant at the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs