This essay reviews four books on the role of religion in shaping state policy, political rhetoric, and activism for and against same-sex rights in the United States. These books are instructive in thinking through relations between race and religion, sexuality and race, religion and rights, freedom and democracy, public and private, church and state. They show that the boundaries between church and state, public and private, identity and rights, race, sexuality, and religion are not as clear as they might seem. The solutions they offer push far past demands for identity-based rights. Indeed, all of them explore how identity is problematically tied up with religion, in ways that facilitate the limitation rather than expansion of rights. Together they outline a queer activist agenda.
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April 1, 2010
Issue Editors
Book Review|
April 01 2010
RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
Sin, Sex, and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right
Cynthia Burack Albany: State University of New York Press
, 2008
. xxxiv + 187 pp
. Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini New York: New York University Press
, 2003
. xiii + 174 pp
. AIDS and American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemic
Thomas L. Long Albany: State University of New York Press
, 2005
. 242 pp
. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
Jasbir K. Puar Durham, NC: Duke University Press
, 2007
. xxviii + 335 pp
. GLQ (2010) 16 (1-2): 297–307.
Citation
Erin Runions; RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. GLQ 1 April 2010; 16 (1-2): 297–307. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2009-024
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