Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century

by Geoffrey R. Stone Narrated by William Dufris

Overview

Renowned constitutional scholar Geoffrey R. Stone traces the evolution of legal and moral codes that have attempted to legislate sexual behavior from the ancient world to America's earliest days to today's fractious political climate. Stone crafts a remarkable, even thrilling narrative in which he shows how agitators, moralists, legislators, and especially the justices of the Supreme Court have historically navigated issues as explosive and divisive as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception. Overturning a raft of contemporary shibboleths, Stone reveals that at the time the Constitution was adopted there were no laws against obscenity and no laws against abortion before the midpoint of pregnancy. A pageant of historical characters?including Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, J. Edgar Hoover, Phyllis Schlafly, and Justice Anthony Kennedy?enlivens this landmark work, which dramatically reveals how our laws about sex, religion, and morality reflect the paradoxes and cultural schisms that have cleaved our nation from its founding.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Writing confidently and expertly about several centuries of American laws regulating sex, Stone shows that the line between moral and religious reasoning was almost always illusory. . . . Sex and the Constitution is most persuasive when Stone turns to America, and his comprehensive knowledge of constitutional law is put on full display. He is especially good on the eighteenth century, bringing a bracing and much-needed dose of reality about the Founders’ views of sexuality. . . . [A] very important book."— Annette Gordon-Reed New York Review of Books

"A comprehensive history and analysis of our law's fitful and frequently schizophrenic treatment of sex…A story that is both fascinating and maddening…This book brings us all the way up to the controversies of our day (including gay marriage) and offers tantalizing glimpses of some of the legal battles that lie ahead…Those interested in adding historical context to their thinking about these hot button issues would be well-advised to add Stone's book to their summer reading list."— David Wecht Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"This masterpiece is the rarest of combinations: a page-turner that is also a magisterial font of wisdom."— Laurence H. Tribe, author of The Invisible Constitution

"This fascinating account of how sexual mores, religion, and law have intersected or—more often—collided throughout American history is really about even more than that. It’s about the role of law in maintaining a civil society in a diverse twenty-first-century America, and a call to the Supreme Court to step up to the challenge."— Linda Greenhouse, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence at Yale Law School

"A volume of lasting significance that quickly will become essential reading not only for law students and scholars but for all who want to better understand sweeping cultural transformations that continue to roil society."— Lee C. Bollinger, president, Columbia University

"Magnificent and monumental—a stunning blend of dispassionate analysis and deep moral conviction. Think that the United States was born as a Christian nation? Think again."— Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University

"A superb examination of the history of how the law has regulated sexual behavior and sexual expression from the ancient world to today."— Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law

"Sex, which has simultaneously inspired and eluded regulation through the ages, has been the focus of many of our greatest constitutional controversies. No one is better suited than the always erudite and lucid Geoffrey Stone to provide the panoramic treatment that the subject deserves. Unless you are the rare person who has no interest in either the Constitution or sex, you will want to read this book."— David Cole, author of Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law

"This title is a commanding synthesis of scholarship on over two centuries of American legal debate and practice regarding these issues, and would work well as the core text for a course of the subject. . . . Stone’s analysis is highly recommended for anyone seeking an introduction to the history of U.S. law and sexual expression."— Publisher's Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-01-04
Sexual expression, obscenity, contraception, and abortion are the focus of this wide-ranging legal, political, and social history.Stone (Law/Univ. of Chicago; Speaking Out!: Reflections on Law, Liberty and Justice, 2010, etc.), a constitutional scholar whose previous books include an award-winning history of free speech, offers a broad, fascinating overview of the nation's shifting, often incendiary, attitudes toward sexuality and the impact of those attitudes on politics and law. Colonists "clearly and emphatically rejected" Puritans' repressive views about sex, and the country's founders, Stone asserts, had no interest in regulating sexuality nor in promoting Christianity. Most were "broad-minded skeptics who viewed religious passion as divisive and irrational, and who consistently challenged, both publicly and privately, traditional Christian dogma." The claim that America is a "Christian nation" originated in the Second Great Awakening, which swept the country from the 1790s to the 1840s. At a time of unsettling social change, "charismatic preachers" excited religious passions that infused "politics, culture, education, relations between the sexes, attitudes about sex," and, most significantly, views on the relationship between religion and government. Believing sex to be sinful, evangelicals mounted a campaign against masturbation and contraception; without fear of pregnancy, they claimed, women's inherent lasciviousness would be uncontrollable. After the Civil War, those ideas were taken up by Anthony Comstock, who policed sexuality with unabated vigor, specifically the dissemination of obscene material through the postal service; obscenity laws persisted even after his death in 1915. In the 1970s, Protestant fundamentalists incited a third awakening, embraced by the Republican Party that coveted the voting power of the Moral Majority. Stone enlivens his narrative with deft portraits of the many judges involved in cases on obscenity, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Some Supreme Court justices, appointed to uphold the views of the Christian right, disappointed their constituencies. The author applauds decisions that reflect the "protection of human dignity and equality" and believes, maybe too optimistically, that religious groups are now "on the defensive." A compelling history of a nation grappling with the moral and legal freedoms that the founders strived to ensure.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170127689
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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