Why Love Leads to Justice: Love across the Boundaries
Cambridge University Press, 10/1/2015
EAN 9781107569829, ISBN10: 1107569826
Paperback, 270 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm
Language: English
This book tells the stories of notable historical figures who, by resisting patriarchal laws condemning adultery, gay and lesbian sex, and sex across the boundaries of religion and race, brought about lasting social and political change. Constitutional scholar David A. J. Richards investigates the lives of leading transgressive artists, social critics, and activists including George Eliot, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Isherwood, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Mead. Richards shows how ethical empowerment, motivated by love, allowed these figures to resist the injustices of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, leading to the constitutional condemnation of these political evils in the United States, Britain, and beyond. Love and law thus grow together, and this book shows how and why. Drawing from developmental psychology (including studies of trauma), political theory, the history of social movements, literature, biography, and law, this book will be a thought-provoking tool for anyone interested in civil rights.
Introduction
love resists injustice
1. Breaking the love laws as resistance
2. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
love and resistance
3. Christopher Isherwood's struggle for a resistant voice
4. Wystan Auden on the anxiety of manhood
5. Bayard Rustin on nonviolence
6. James Baldwin on love and voice
7. Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict on resisting patriarchy
Conclusion
moral injury and love
why love leads to justice.