Rights through Resistance: What lies beyond Legalism for the LGBT Movement?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Kuriakose ◽  
Deepa Iyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Local Case ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Lgbt Movement

<p>This paper examines how the LGBT movement has prioritised identity politics and human rights discourse to gain legal equality and non-discrimination in employment and social policy in many parts of the world. The legalist approach taken so far has marginalised more radical possibilities of resistance by rendering diverse identities and intersectionality invisible. Furthermore, it has also given ammunition to counter mobilisation led by the religious right and cultural nationalism to dictate terms of the debate leading to political and judicial backlash. In this context, historical examination of the LGBT movement in comparison with civil rights movement and local case-studies gives three trajectories of ‘lost’ possibilities, a new context and significance. These possibilities are (i) limiting the forces of counter mobilisation to set the agenda for LGBT politics, (ii) reframing LGBT identity issues by expanding priorities, and, (iii) returning to every day politics of resistance to question normativity. This paper argues that such a revitalisation allows grassroots to be organically connected with agenda setting and enables a critique of macro-institutions through micro politics. Such a development has potential to usher a new age of LGBT resistance beyond legalism. </p>

Rights through Resistance: What lies beyond Legalism for the LGBT Movement?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Kuriakose ◽  
Deepa Iyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Local Case ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Lgbt Movement

<p>This paper examines how the LGBT movement has prioritised identity politics and human rights discourse to gain legal equality and non-discrimination in employment and social policy in many parts of the world. The legalist approach taken so far has marginalised more radical possibilities of resistance by rendering diverse identities and intersectionality invisible. Furthermore, it has also given ammunition to counter mobilisation led by the religious right and cultural nationalism to dictate terms of the debate leading to political and judicial backlash. In this context, historical examination of the LGBT movement in comparison with civil rights movement and local case-studies gives three trajectories of ‘lost’ possibilities, a new context and significance. These possibilities are (i) limiting the forces of counter mobilisation to set the agenda for LGBT politics, (ii) reframing LGBT identity issues by expanding priorities, and, (iii) returning to every day politics of resistance to question normativity. This paper argues that such a revitalisation allows grassroots to be organically connected with agenda setting and enables a critique of macro-institutions through micro politics. Such a development has potential to usher a new age of LGBT resistance beyond legalism. </p>

God Can Save Us

Rough Country ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Moral Majority ◽  
Jerry Falwell ◽  
Protestant Denominations

This chapter discusses the emergence of the New Christian Right or simply the Religious Right as a powerful new force in American politics. The rise of the Religious Right has been examined from all angles, and several key factors have been identified. It clearly depended on leadership. The most visible leaders were preacher Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority rallies at state capitals had been gaining attention in the late 1970s, and fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, whose popular 700 Club television program included discussions of social and moral topics. Both were canny entrepreneurs who knew how to attract media attention, and there were conservative political operatives eager to enlist their support. There were unifying issues as well, such as opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and promiscuity, and the more general sense that religion was under siege by secularity and humanism. And there were lingering divisions within Protestant denominations and among Catholics over such issues as social activism, the legacies of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, communism, gender equality, the ordination of women, and theology.

Equal Employment, Voting Rights, and Public Policy at the National Level

2019 ◽  
pp. 168-201
Author(s):  
Brandon K. Winford
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
National Level ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
High Level

Chapter 5 examines Wheeler’s impact on the civil rights movement as a broker on a wider scale during the early 1960s. It argues that during these years, he utilized his increasing political influence regionally and nationally to change policies related to discrimination in employment and voting rights for black Americans. Not only that, but Wheeler vigorously championed the inclusion of blacks in high-level positions within local, state, and federal governments and condemned agencies for their own failures in implementing new employment policies as mandated by the federal government.

American Evangelical Politics During the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Lahr
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
World Order ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conservative Coalition ◽  
The Cold War

During the decades of the Cold War, belief and power blended in ways that better integrated Protestant evangelicals into the mainstream American political culture. As the nuclear age corresponded with the early Cold War, evangelicals offered an eschatological narrative to help make sense of what appeared to many to be an increasingly dangerous world. At the same time, the post–World War II anticommunism that developed during the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made room for evangelical interpretations that supported their good-versus-evil rhetoric. Evangelist Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders consistently referenced Cold War events and promoted Christian nationalism while at the same time calling on Americans to turn to God and away from sin. Evangelical missionaries, who had long interpreted the world for fellow believers in the pews back home, were agents advocating for American values abroad, but they also weighed in on American foreign policy matters in sometimes unexpected ways. By the time the Cold War world order had fully emerged in the 1950s, cold warriors were fighting the geopolitical battle for influence in part by promoting an “American way of life” that included religion, allowing evangelicals to help shape the Cold War consensus. White evangelicals were more ambivalent about supporting the civil rights movement that challenged the inclusivity of that consensus, even though civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made the case for civil rights using moral and spiritual arguments that were familiar to evangelicalism. As the long sixties brought divisions within the country over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the women’s rights movement, evangelicals participated in the political discussions that captivated the country and were divided themselves. By the 1970s, conservative evangelicals helped to create the Religious Right, and a small group of liberal evangelicals began to contest it. The Religious Right would be more successful, however, in defining political evangelicalism as the culture wars extended into the 1980s. Conservative evangelicalism matured during the Reagan years and become an important part of the conservative coalition. Even as the Cold War ended, the political networks and organizations that evangelicals formed in the second half of the 20th century, both conservative and progressive, have continued to influence evangelicals’ political participation.

Identity Politics

Anthropology ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Neofotistos
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Gay And Lesbian Movement ◽  
The Right

Identity politics, also commonly referred to as the politics of identity or identity-based politics, is a phrase that is widely used in the social sciences and humanities to describe the deployment of the category of identity as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orientate social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition. Additionally, identity politics refers to tensions and struggles over the right to map and define the contours and fixed “essence” of specific groups. The phrase has become increasingly common in political anthropology since the second half of the 20th century with the emergence of a wide diversity of social movements, including the women’s movement, the African American civil rights movement, and the gay and lesbian movement, as well as nationalist and postcolonial movements. Central to the practice of identity politics are the notions of sameness and difference, and thus the anthropological study of identity politics involves the study of the politics of difference.

The Devil Won, Hands Down

God with Us ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 117-139
Author(s):  
Ansley L. Quiros
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Christian Schools ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Private Christian Schools ◽  
The Devil

This chapter details the response of segregationists and conservatives to the civil rights movement. It describes the depiction of the movement as violent following the death of Andy Whately, the ostracization of white Southerners who sympathized with demands for justice, like Warren Fortson, and the establishment of private Christian schools in response to integration. In these actions, white conservatives reframed their resistance to racial justice in theological terms that would come to define the Religious Right.

scholarly journals ‘No longer exiled, but protagonists’. The FILEF (Italian Federation of Migrant Workers and Families) and European human rights discourse in the 1970s

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Francesco Vizzarri
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Community Regulation ◽  
Transnational Network ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

This article examines the contribution of the FILEF (Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Migranti e Famiglie) to the European debate on the human, social and civil rights of migrant workers during the 1970s. Through the project of an ‘International Statute of Migrant Workers’ Rights’, presented to the European Parliament in 1971, FILEF submitted a proposal for the reform of the 1968 Community Regulation on the Free Movement of Migrant Workers in Europe in order to extend to workers from non-European countries the same rights and protections accorded to those from the EEC area. The analysis is focused on the discussion around the proposal in the committees of the European Parliament as well as on the debate that developed within the transnational network of the FILEF during the international conferences organised by the Federation from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s.

Global Responsibility and the Enhancement of Life

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
William Schweiker
Keyword(s):  
Capabilities Approach ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Global Ethics ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Moral Good ◽  
Global Responsibility ◽  
Ethics Of Responsibility ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Historical Life

This article advances a conception of global ethics in terms of the centrality of responsibility to the moral life and also the moral good of the enhancement of life. In contrast to some forms of global ethics, the article also seeks to warrant the use of religious sources in developing such an ethics. Specifically, the article seeks to demonstrate the greater adequacy of a global ethics of responsibility for the enhancement of life against rival conceptions developed in terms of Human Rights discourse or the so-called Capabilities Approach. The article ends with a conception of ‘conscience’ as the mode of human moral being and the experience of religious transcendence within the domains of human social and historical life. From this idea, conscience is specified a human right and capacity to determine the humane use of religious resources and also the norm for the rejection of inhumane expressions of religion within global ethics.

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