You Can’t Have Your Cake: A Queer-Informed View of Religious Conscientious Exemptions from Equality Law

This paper offers a Queer-informed challenge to Adenitire’s claim that the principle of liberal neutrality can sometimes justify religious conscientious objection to equality law. It begins with a Queer critique of the assumptions behind the rights paradigm of classical liberalism; it will then use the case law as a springboard for challenging the legitimacy of faith-based discrimination in the public sphere, highlighting the limitations of a neutral liberal approach to conscientious exemptions from equality law. Through these arguments, the paper seeks to demonstrate that (i) a neutral liberal approach to this conflict can result in harm to non-heterosexuals; and (ii) Queer theory can play a useful role in challenging some of the normative assumptions in this conflict and in supporting instead a value-based approach