Will LGBT Antidiscrimination Law Follow the Course of Race Antidiscrimination Law?

50 Pages Posted: 30 Mar 2016

See all articles by Robert S. Chang

Robert S. Chang

Seattle University School of Law

Date Written: 2016

Abstract

This Article examines several decades of race antidiscrimination law to conjecture about the course LGBT civil rights might take following Obergefell v. Hodges. It draws from Alan Freeman’s germinal Minnesota Law Review article, Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, and asks whether Freeman’s thesis that race antidiscrimination law actually serves to legitimize the status quo of real-world racial inequality might apply with equal force in the context of LGBT civil rights and LGBT inequality. The Article suggests that the Court may develop, similar to its colorblind constitutionalism, a “sexuality-blind constitutionalism” in which formal equality is achieved but where distinctions drawn between public and private as well as the accommodation of religion might produce equality in name while leaving much inequality unredressed and legally unredressable. While not arguing for the abandonment of civil rights efforts in federal courts, the Article urges that these efforts be accompanied by efforts in state courts as well as in the political sphere at all levels. State level efforts may result in an unsatisfactory patchwork of equality and inequality based on geography, but state level advances in equality may inform changes that occur eventually at the federal level.

Keywords: civil rights, antidiscrimination law, lgbt rights, race, sexual orientation, critical legal studies, critical race theory

Suggested Citation

Chang, Robert S., Will LGBT Antidiscrimination Law Follow the Course of Race Antidiscrimination Law? (2016). Minnesota Law Review, Forthcoming, Seattle University School of Law Research Paper No. 16-06, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2756658

Robert S. Chang (Contact Author)

Seattle University School of Law ( email )

901 12th Avenue, Sullivan Hall
P.O. Box 222000
Seattle, WA n/a 98122-1090
United States

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