Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2012
Center/Program
Center for Gender & Sexuality Law
Abstract
The article offers a critical analysis of the complexities of having the state recognize and then take up gay rights as a cause of its own. I examine three principal contexts – the role of gay rights in the state of Israel’s re-branding campaign, the response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2007 speech at Columbia University in which he claimed that there were no homosexuals in Iran, and the role of gay rights in Romania’s effort to join the European Community – as examples of the moral hazards that a minority faces when the state takes up their interests and uses their rights for purposes that well-exceed the obvious interests of the new rights-bearing community. I conclude that critical awareness of the state’s role as fundamental partner in the recognition and protection of a form of sexual rights should push us to regard these “victories” as necessarily ethically compromised.
Recommended Citation
Katherine M. Franke,
Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights,
Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, Fall 2012
(2012).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1773
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, European Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons