Gay Marriage and Religious Freedom: Lessons from Hobbes

Abstract

Wendling argues against a religious exemption from participating in gay marriages guaranteed by the civil body. To do so, she recalls the history of the social contract tradition in its pre-revolutionary form, and especially in the texts of Thomas Hobbes. Writing against the backdrop of religious civil wars, Hobbes argued that in environments of religious pluralism, positive religious freedoms must always be subordinate to negative religious freedoms and to the interests of a peace-seeking state. Without this subordination, positive religious freedoms would not even be possible. Wendling considers the import of this dialectic for the Free-Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution, arguing that the clause may be incompatible with this truth of the modern state.|Keywords: gay marriage, religious freedom, Hobbes, social contract, Free-Exercise Clause