Religious Freedom vs LGBT Rights: dilemmas in times of pluralism - Seminar

In pluralist societies, corporate religious freedom might come in conflict with other fundamental rights. For example, a secular company may want to keep religion out of the workplace – leading to its decision to prohibit employees from wearing religious dress. Or corporate piety can collide with LGBT rights, for instance when a company’s management does not accept individuals whom it believes to have “sinful” sexual orientations as employees or clients.

Jeroen Temperman examines, from a combined legal, comparative and philosophical perspective, the latter human rights collision – religious freedom versus LGBT rights – from a combined legal, comparative and philosophical perspective. Specifically, he engages with questions whether companies can be deemed “religious”, whether they can claim religious freedom, and if so, what the scope of such a freedom is, notably when other rights may be affected by such corporate manifestations of religion.

The lecture addresses FBK-ISR’s mission Religion & Innovation and in particular innovation in Religion and the Law by way of focusing on diversification of religious identities, especially freshly emerging religious freedom claimants within the legal arena, as well as novel responses thereto from the law and judiciary.

The lecture is part of FBK-ISR’s research line Conflicts.