LGBT Advocate Shannon Price Minter to Give Thomas Lecture March 6
Shannon Price Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, will give the James A. Thomas lecture on Monday, March 6, 2017, at 4:30 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge. Minter’s lecture is titled “Belief and Belonging: Reconciling Legal Protections for Religious Pluralism and LGBT Youth.”
Minter urges a new approach to the perceived clash between religious pluralism and protections for LGBT youth. “Even in the face of enormous gains for LGBT equality, LGBT youth comprise 40% of all homeless youth and nearly 20% of youth in juvenile detention facilities, and continue—as they have been for decades—to be at dramatically heightened risk of suicide attempts, depression, and substance abuse,” Minter said. “New research strongly links those negative outcomes to family rejection, rooted in traditional religious beliefs.”
Minter will discuss how religious communities are responding to these statistics with concern. He will propose ways that the law can give religious communities the space they need to integrate LGBT children on their own terms, in ways that may look very different than secular models of family acceptance. Minter urges advocates on both sides to recognize the importance of this extraordinary moment and how it might change our understanding of what the law can and cannot achieve.
Shannon Price Minter, a transgender man, is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, one of the nation’s leading legal advocacy groups for LGBT people. Minter argued before the California Supreme Court in 2008 on behalf of same-sex couples seeking the freedom to marry and was counsel in other successful challenges to state marriage bans in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. He represented married same-sex couples from Tennessee in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision striking down state laws barring same-sex couples from marriage. In 2011, Minter was counsel for an LGBT student group in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661, which held that student group non-discrimination policies do not violate the First Amendment. He serves on the ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and on the boards of Gender Spectrum and Faith in America. Minter received a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. from Cornell Law School. He currently lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Robin Gilbrecht-Minter.
The James A. Thomas Lecture was established in 1989 in honor of Associate Dean James A. Thomas ’64 and his many years of service to Yale Law School. It brings to the Law School a scholar whose work addresses the concerns of communities or groups currently marginalized within the legal academy or society at large.
