Who’s the Bigot?
Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law
Monday, October 26, 2020
12:45–2:00 p.m.
This symposium celebrates the publication of Who’s the Bigot?: Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law authored by Linda McClain, followed by a panel discussion by three eminent legal scholars. After panelists comment on Professor McClain’s book, McClain offers a response.
Commentators:
Jonathan Kahn, Professor of Law and Biology, Northeastern University
M. Cathleen Kaveny, Darald and Juliet Libby Professor, Boston College Law School
Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
About the Book
Although denouncing and preventing bigotry is a shared political value with a long history, people disagree over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This is evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is intolerant political correctness, even bigotry itself. Both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections have included charges, denials, and countercharges of bigotry. Historically, critics of interracial, interfaith, and most recently same-sex marriage have invoked conscience and religious liberty to defend their objections and denied that such objections reflected bigotry.
In Who’s the Bigot?, BU Law’s Robert Kent Professor of Law, Linda C. McClain, traces the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience across a range of debates relating to marriage and antidiscrimination law. Is “bigotry” simply the term society gives to repudiated beliefs that now are beyond the pale? She argues that the differing views people hold about bigotry reflect competing understandings of what it means to be “on the wrong side of history” and the ways present forms of discrimination resemble or differ from past forms. Furthermore, McClain shows that bigotry has both a backward- and forward-looking dimension. We not only learn the meaning of bigotry by looking to the past, but we also use examples of bigotry, on which there is now consensus, as the basis for making new judgments about what does or does not constitute bigotry and coming to new understandings of both injustice and justice.
By examining charges of bigotry and defenses based on conscience and religious belief in these debates, Who’s the Bigot? makes a novel and timely contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religious liberty and discrimination in American life.
About the Speaker
McClain has authored or co-authored seven books, most recently Who’s the Bigot?: Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (Oxford University Press, March 2020). Her other books are Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues (Harvard University Press, 2013) (with BU Law faculty member James 
E. Fleming); The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2006); two edited volumes, Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2009; pbk ed., 2012) (with Joanna L. Grossman) (mentioned in the credits of the film, On the Basis of Sex), and What is Parenthood?: Contemporary Debates about the Family (NYU Press, 2013) (with Daniel Cere); the co-authored casebook, Contemporary Family Law (West Academic, 5th ed. 2020), and co-authored textbook, Gay Rights and the Constitution (Foundation Press, 2016). McClain has also published numerous articles and book chapters.
McClain has been a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University Center for Human Values and a faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. A past chair of the Family and Juvenile Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, she currently serves on the Executive Committee of that Section and the Section on Women in Legal Education and is a member of the American Law Institute. At the School of Law, McClain has organized interdisciplinary conferences and symposia, including a recent virtual conference on the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, establishing the right of women to vote. As an affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGS) Program, she coordinates the law school’s participation in the WGS Certificate Program for JD students. McClain is also faculty advisor to the Women’s Law Association. In addition to teaching at BU School of Law, McClain also teaches in the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.
All – including not only professors, law students, graduate students, and undergraduates, but also alumni and the general public – are welcome to attend the symposium. If you have academic questions about the program, please contact Professor David Webber, dhwebber@bu.edu.