The clash between religious freedom and equality for lesbians and gay men has become a controversial legal issue in the United Kingdom. Increasingly, claims are made that compliance with anti-discrimination norms impacts upon conscientious, faith-based objectors to same-sex sexual acts. This article explores this issue and draws insights from North American case law, where this question has been considered in the context of competing constitutional rights. It raises far-reaching issues concerning the distinction between belief and practice, as well as the (...) role of identity in the public sphere. The author advocates that courts and tribunals should adopt a fact-specific approach which is sensitive to the rights in a particular context, and which focuses upon the values of accommodation, tolerance and mutual respect. (shrink)

This note critically interrogates the Civil Partnership Act 2004. Through an examination of the legislative background and some of the provisions of the Act, it is argued that civil partnership mirrors a marriage model with some exceptions. In creating this new legal status, the legislation also exacerbates the exclusion of some relationship forms from dominant legal norms. It should be understood as part of an agenda for social inclusion, rather than as radical social change.

This article analyses the decision of the US Supreme Court in Hurley and South Boston Allied War Veterans Council v Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, in which the Court held that a lesbian, gay, and bisexual group could be prevented from marching in Boston's St Patrick's Day Parade. The author interprets the decision as a text through which the identities Irish, Irish-American, and American are constituted and reflected. The article begins with a consideration of the centrality of (...) the rights of speech and equality to the American national identity, and then proceeds to interrogate the role of parading as a performative spectacle in the acting out of national and group identities. An examination of the Hurley decision follows, which focuses on how the issue of who is allowed to march, and what that marching is thought to signify, serves as a metaphor for the ways in which an American national identity is itself conceived. The author argues that the dispute underscores deeper conflicts concerning how nations are conceived in sexualized terms, and whether American society today is better understood as a social group with a shared purpose, or as a series of diverse social groups which simply share space and a set of rules which govern coexistence. (shrink)

Gays and lesbians are full-fledged members of the great Quebec family, and it is perhaps time to reinvent and enlarge our family.