The relationship between religious complicity claims and discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community has been explored quite a bit in the last few years. This talk will focus on the supposed conflict between religious complicity claims and LGBTQ rights, especially transgender rights and same-sex marriage in the United States, and the relative lack of such complicity claims in Japan where cultural objections to same-sex marriage are used more often than religious ones, and where some transgender rights are more recognized than in the United States. The talk will argue for a contextual approach to these issues in the United States. That approach would legally protect religious complicity claims in some situations, but not others, and would consider who (or what sort of entity) is making the complicity claim as well as the nature of the harm legal protection of the complicity claim would inflict on members of the LGBTQ community. In Japan, the contextual approach has benefits as well; although it is less clear how it might work in the Japanese legal system.
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