Religion and Sexuality

The Sacred Precincts of Marital Bedrooms: Religion and the Making of Griswold

In our final installment of Notches’ series commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, Heather Munro Prescott invites us to reconsider the significance of Griswold by focusing on the ways in which liberal clergy helped build a broad popular consensus on birth control. In so doing, Prescott foregrounds how liberal religion […]

Religious and Reproductive Politics in the United States since WWII

By notcheseditor June 23, 2015 Dispatches, Post-1945 United States, Religion and Sexuality 0 comments

Rebecca L. Davis The fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision, which struck down state laws that banned married people’s use of contraceptives, arrives in the midst of fraught contests across the United States over women’s access to reproductive healthcare. From last year’s Burwell v. Hobby […]

Reading Silences in Histories of Religion and Sexuality

By notcheseditor March 26, 2015 Dispatches, Religion and Sexuality 0 comments

Philippa Koch How do we, as scholars of religion, interrogate the silences in our sources? And what do silences in religious texts reveal about sexuality, sickness and race? This was the framing question of the panel “Silences in Protestant Autobiography: Exploring Sickness, Sexuality, and Race in American Religion,” which I organized […]

Believe It: Finding Religion in the History of U.S. Sexuality

By Gillian Frank November 24, 2014 Pedagogy, Post-1945 United States, Religion and Sexuality 2 comments

Rebecca Davis, Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton and Heather White For close to a decade, the eminent U.S. historian John D’Emilio has performed an important scholarly service by urging the fields he helped establish—LGBT history and the history of sexuality—to devote more attention to religious themes and actors. In 2004, he addressed the recently […]

Orthodox Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Re-Making of Jewish Sexuality

By Rachel Gordan October 28, 2014 Post-1945 United States, Religion and Sexuality 0 comments

Rachel Gordan In 1949, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became a bestseller and sparked a widespread conversation about sexual norms and sexual variance in the US. Kinsey’s 1953 volume on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was even more explosive as it challenged widely held views of female sexuality. […]

Mainline Protestants and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage

By Heather White October 14, 2014 LGBTQ, Religion and Sexuality 1 comment

Heather White Four days ago, a federal judge struck down North Carolina’s same-sex marriage ban. This ruling heralded a legal victory for the United Church of Christ, a Protestant denomination, which had sued the state for the right to marry same-sex couples. Since 2005, the UCC has affirmed its support for “equal marriage rights […]

The Yellow Star and the Pink Triangle: Judaism and Gay Rights in the 1970s

By Gillian Frank August 19, 2014 Childhood and Youth, Post-1945 United States, Religion and Sexuality 3 comments

Gillian Frank Homosexuals cannot reproduce—so they must recruit, and to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America. – Anita Bryant In 1977, Anita Bryant became the face of a right wing religious coalition, Save Our Children (SOC). SOC, which was based in Dade County Florida, enshrined into national conservative politics […]