Bøker av David A. J. Richards

Masculine codes of honor and dominance often are expressed in acts of violence, including war and terrorism. This book examines the lives of five famous men - great leaders and crusaders - who actively resisted violence and presented their causes with more humane alternatives.

An interpretive history of culture and law, political philosophy and constitutional analysis, explaining the background, development and growing impact of two challenging human rights movements: feminism and gay rights. This text argues that both movements are extensions of rights-based dissent.

Examines the case for the legal recognition of gay rights as basic human rights. This work explores the connections between gay rights and three rights movements - black civil rights, feminism and religious toleration - to determine how these might serve as analogies for the gay rights movement.

This book argues that there is an important connection between ethical resistance to British imperialism and the ethical discovery of gay rights. It examines the roots of liberal resistance in Britain and resistance to patriarchy in the USA, showing the importance of fighting the demands of patriarchal manhood and womanhood to countering imperialism. Advocates of feminism and gay rights are key because they resist the gender binary's role in rationalizing sexism and homophobia. The connection between the rise of gay rights and the fall of empire illuminates questions of the meaning of democracy and universal human rights as shared human values that have appeared since World War II. The book casts doubt on the thesis that arguments for gay rights must be extrinsic to democracy and reflect Western values. To the contrary, gay rights arise from within liberal democracy, and its critics polemically use such opposition to cover and rationalize their own failures of democracy.

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.

Why, from Reagan to George Bush, have fundamentalists in religion and in law (originalists) exercised such political power and influence in the United States? Why has the Republican Party forged an ideology of judicial appointments (originalism) hostile to abortion and gay rights? Why and how did Barack Obama distinguish himself among Democratic candidates not only by his opposition to the Iraq war but by his opposition to originalism? This book argues that fundamentalism in both religion and law threatens democratic values and draws its appeal from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives and at threat from the constitutional developments since the 1960s. The argument analyzes this psychology (based on traumatic loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals). Obama's resistance to originalism arises from his developmental history as a democratic, as opposed to patriarchal, man who resists the patriarchal demands on men and women that originalism enforces - in particular, the patriarchal love laws that tell people who and how and how much they may love.