Human Rights for Everyone, Everywhere: The Report of the Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexuality and Gender

Christine M. Venter is a teaching professor at Notre Dame Law School and affiliated faculty in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Among the fundamental core concepts underpinning human rights is the concept that they are indivisible and interdependent. This precept is sorely tested when proponents of religious liberty and LGBTQ+ rights respectively assert that their group’s rights trump the rights of other groups. At a conference last year in Rome, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito asserted that “[r]eligious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power.” Alito is not alone in his assessment; headlines abound about the threats to religious liberty,whether by the Chinese government in its persecution of Uyghurs, India’s attacks on Muslims, or acts of vandalism against Catholic Churches. The belief that religious liberty is under threat, coupled with incidents like the leak of the Dobbs decision, has created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Alito went on to speculate that religiously motivated attacks “probably grow out of something dark and deep in the human DNA—the tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like ourselves.

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Obergefell v. Hodges: Five Years Later

Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination – Obergefell vs Hodges. Photo Creator: Ted Eytan

On June 26, 2015 the Supreme Court of the United States issued its momentous opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.  Only a few SCOTUS decisions have provoked such strong debate over the majority’s arguments and its understanding of human dignity or the nature of judicial power.  In this blog conversation, American and European legal scholars and lawyers reflect on the postmodern understanding of marriage that inspired the decision and on the consequences of Obergefell for promotion of LGBTI-people’s rights, on religious exemptions, on democracy in the United States, on children’s rights, on the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence, and on the search for the compromise between religious freedom and anti-discrimination claims. This variety of reflections, both positive and critical, illustrates how the decision has become an important episode in American and global legal and human rights history. (more…)

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Obergefell, Our Common Humanity, and Putting Children First

 

 

 


Tanner Bean is an Attorney with the law firm Fabian VanCott in Salt Lake City, Utah

Robin Fretwell Wilson is Director, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois System & Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law

However a person viewed marriage equality in the run up to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 United States Supreme Court case that opened marriage to same-sex couples, it showed that marriage matters to Americans. The plaintiffs in Obergefell sought access to marriage on the same grounds as heterosexual couples, for reasons as pedestrian as filing joint taxes (just one of over a thousand statutory benefits of marriage) to those as meaningful as joining their lives in ways that communities and families recognize as significant. (more…)

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