Noah's Curse: How Religion Often Conflates Status, Belief, and Conduct to Resist Antidiscrimination Norms

Today, many devout Christian fundamentalists supportsome state discrimination against gay people, on theground that full equality for gays would mean fewerliberties for themselves. In its recent controversy with apublic law school, the Christian Legal Society argued thatit was entitled to state subsidies even though it violatedthe school's antidiscrimination policy. The Society said itexcluded only "unrepentant homosexuals"-those gaypersons whose "immoral" conduct and degraded statuswere directly linked to what the Society considered ananti-Christian message.Professor Eskridge demonstrates that the same clashbetween equality for minorities and liberty for Christianfundamentalists played out in the context of race. Most oftoday's antigay denominations were generations earlierantiblack as a matter of faith.

When people of color soughtthe end of slavery and, later, apartheid, they were met byarguments that more equal treatment for people of Africandescent would violate the liberties enjoyed by Christians ofEuropean descent.Moreover, religion, society, and the state are mutuallyconstitutive-each influences the others. Thus, advancesin racial equality were accompanied and at the same timeabetted by the abandonment of racist religious doctrines.Professor Eskridge argues that pro-tolerance religiouspersons and groups are critical players in the progress ofsociety toward more equal treatment of sexual minoritiesin the future as well as racial minorities in the past.