While the Christian Right has spearheaded a variety of anti-gay projects over the past fifteen years, including interventions in public schools, anti-gay-rights initiatives, and support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, observers of the institutionalized Christian Right have also noted a softening of anti-gay public rhetoric. Sin, Sex, and Democracy analyzes these two ostensibly conflicting phenomena.
Examining Christian witnessing tracts, the ex-gay movement, and recent linkages between gays and terrorists, Cynthia Burack argues that as the Christian Right has become a more sophisticated interest group, leaders have become adept at tailoring different messages for mainstream audiences and for the internal pedagogical processes of Christian conservatives. Understanding the rhetoric and the theological convictions that lie behind them, Burack claims, is essential to better understand how American politics work and how to effectively respond to exclusionary forms of political thought and practice.
"This book offers a meticulously detailed account of the way in which antigay discourse is constructed and employed by the Christian Right and those closely associated with it. It is a topic of significance and central to the academic study of politics and cultural practice of politics, particularly in the United States." -- Angelia R. Wilson, author of Below the Belt: Sexuality, Religion, and the American South
"The appeal of this book is the niche it fills: at a time when critics take well-worn and cheap shots at the Christian Right ill fitting the seriousness of the times, this author demands that critics take the Christian Right seriously, not only politically, but theologically." -- Amy E. Ansell, editor of Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics
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