PROGRAM
Please join us at Roosevelt House as we welcome Geoffrey R. Stone, one of America’s most distinguished legal scholars, to discuss his groundbreaking new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century, a one-volume history that overturns popular shibboleths, while dramatically narrating the epic story of how sex came to be legislated in America.
Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, will discuss a range of issues, from the Revolutionary era to today, including why the Founding Fathers, acutely aware of the need to separate politics from the divisive forces of religion, crafted a constitution that expressed the fundamental values of the Enlightenment. He will explore why through much of the nineteenth-century Americans continued to view sex as a matter of private concern — and what changed in the late and early twentieth centuries to reverse such tolerance, leading to new laws banning pornography, contraception, and abortion. Bringing the story into the present, Stone recounts such critical Supreme Court cases as Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), Roe v. Wade (abortion), and Obergefell v. Hodges (gay marriage), and examines the ways in which the 2016 presidential election may have imperiled the progress of the last half century.
