Queer/Religious Friendship in the Obama Era

In Queer/Religious Friendship in the Obama Era, Jeff Redding delves into the politics of Proposition 8 and gay marriage more broadly. He urges self-identified queers to use their electoral defeat to reconsider both substantive political goals and coalitions. The Article rejects the conventional norms and metrics of identity politics in the U.S., which typically urge power and dignity through inclusion and accommodation of differences within mainstream institutions. Of course, in the Prop 8 debate, this means rejecting civil unions as inferior and insisting on access to marriage.

Redding rejects this norm, instead contending that civil unions should be viewed as a potentially queer space, not unlike the personal law regimes utilized by some religious minorities in other countries. The development of recognition pluralism in the U.S. can both provide queers with some agency and dignity, while also "building a kind of legal regime that is more encouraging of legislative spaces protective of" queer interests. Queer/Religious Friendship also urges innovative and previously unthinkable alliances, urging for instance that queers build coalitions with religious minorities who also seek to carve spaces outside of state regulation.