Sex and the constitution Sex, religion, and law from America's origins to the twenty-first century

Review by New York Times Review

THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) FitzGerald's fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and, led by Billy Graham and others, merged with the Republican Party. WHITE TEARS, by Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two white hipster record producers create a "classic" blues song as an internet hoax, but it turns out (perhaps) to be real. This dark, complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and (of course) the blues is written with Kunzru's customary eloquence and skill. SEX AND THE CONSTITUTION: Sex, Religion, and Law From America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century, by Geoffrey R. Stone. (Liveright, $35.) A professor's history takes off as it approaches the increasingly tolerant present; Stone can recognize a good anecdote or a colorful character when he sees one. JERZY, by Jerome Charyn. (Bellevue Literary, paper, $16.99.) This novel, based on the life of the celebrity fiction writer and fabulist Jerzy Kosinski, has a light touch but manages to lift heavy subjects. Charyn makes the real and the imagined sound equally plausible. BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The Third Reich was literally an altered state, according to Ohler's provocative account: methamphetamines for the SS and the troops, along with factory workers and housewives; cocaine, steroids, sex hormones and an early form of OxyContin for the Führer. THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY: The Extraordinary Adventure of "Les Misérables," by David Bellos. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Rarely has a work of literature suffered so at the hands of publishers, translators, filmmakers and musical impresarios, as Bellos's impeccably researched and pithily written book demonstrates. It doubles as a fascinating partial biography of Victor Hugo. EVENINGLAND: Stories, by Michael Knight. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Knight pays careful writerly attention to the details of desperation among prosperous characters in his impressive story cycle set in and around Mobile Bay, Ala. The ghost of Walker Percy hovers. THE IDIOT, by El if Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.) An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the '90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman's hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel. EARTHLY REMAINS, by Donna Leon. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) The seemingly unstoppable polluting of Venice's great lagoon is at the heart of this new mystery. The 26 th of Leon's novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, it is one of her best, and saddest. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Sex comes first in legal scholar Stone's (Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, 2004) massive book. Indeed, the Constitution arrives only after page 100. Before then, part one provides an elegantly literate précis of historical attitudes about sex in the U.S.' line of cultural inheritance, from classical Greece and Rome and the Bible to Christian Rome and Western Europe to Puritan and eighteenth-century England and its American colonies. Throughout, Stone focuses on obscenity, birth control, and homosexuality precisely the matters that U.S. law has struggled with from the mid-nineteenth century onward. That troika of torments is less evident in part two, Founders, which tracks the deliberations over the relationship of religion and government that led to a Constitution without mention of God, and, eventually, the First and Ninth Amendments, the concept of unenumerated rights, and Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state. Part three consists of brilliant historical distillations of social phenomena the Second Great Awakening, the suppression-of-vice movement, the anticontraception and antiabortion movements, and the criminalization of homosexuality and their legal ramifications. The last three parts present a century of cases that have, Stone says, brought the U.S. to a revolutionary moment, a high point in personal rights of sexual expression. The story continues, of course, but this is the definitive account of its past and present.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Constitutional scholar Stone (Perilous Times) explores how the United States has regulated human sexuality from the colonial period to the present day. Beginning with a brief discussion of attitudes toward sexuality in the ancient world, medieval Europe, England, and Puritan New England, the author then outlines the Enlightenment-era concerns regarding government, religion, and individual freedom that shaped the U.S. constitutional law, and the lasting influence of the Second Great Awakening on morality laws. After providing this background, the work combines a thematic and roughly chronological survey of Christian attitudes toward, and U.S. legal treatment of, three areas of human sexuality: sexual speech and obscenity, abortion and contraception, and homosexual acts and identity. This title is a commanding synthesis of scholarship on over two centuries of American legal debate and practice regarding these issues, and would work well as the core text for a course of the subject. Less developed is the history of Christian attitudes regarding sexuality, with the work repeatedly situating American Christianity in opposition to more tolerant secular values. The work also lacks any substantive discussion of non-Christian religious approaches to sexuality and liberty. Despite these limitations, Stone's analysis is highly recommended for anyone seeking an introduction to the history of U.S. law and sexual expression. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Constitutional scholar Stone (Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, Univ. of Chicago Law Sch.) tackles his subject with serious intent and novelistic sweep, along the way dispatching the notion that the nation's founders cared about sexual behavior. Obscenity wasn't illegal back then, and the criminal code didn't consider abortion a criminal matter until the midpoint of pregnancy. Then as Americans settled in for the long haul, their religious fervor sparked laws intended to punish non-status quo sexual conduct-with women being the frequent target of moral arbiters. Stone is aided by his narrator, William Dufris, who deftly evokes a host of judges, crusaders, professional prudes, and sexual outlaws. VERDICT A work this wide-ranging risks turning ramshackle; not so with this duo in charge. ["The definitive work on the topic": LJ 2/15/17 starred review of the Liveright: Norton hc.]- Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Sexual expression, obscenity, contraception, and abortion are the focus of this wide-ranging legal, political, and social history.Stone (Law/Univ. of Chicago; Speaking Out!: Reflections on Law, Liberty and Justice, 2010, etc.), a constitutional scholar whose previous books include an award-winning history of free speech, offers a broad, fascinating overview of the nation's shifting, often incendiary, attitudes toward sexuality and the impact of those attitudes on politics and law. Colonists "clearly and emphatically rejected" Puritans' repressive views about sex, and the country's founders, Stone asserts, had no interest in regulating sexuality nor in promoting Christianity. Most were "broad-minded skeptics who viewed religious passion as divisive and irrational, and who consistently challenged, both publicly and privately, traditional Christian dogma." The claim that America is a "Christian nation" originated in the Second Great Awakening, which swept the country from the 1790s to the 1840s. At a time of unsettling social change, "charismatic preachers" excited religious passions that infused "politics, culture, education, relations between the sexes, attitudes about sex," and, most significantly, views on the relationship between religion and government. Believing sex to be sinful, evangelicals mounted a campaign against masturbation and contraception; without fear of pregnancy, they claimed, women's inherent lasciviousness would be uncontrollable. After the Civil War, those ideas were taken up by Anthony Comstock, who policed sexuality with unabated vigor, specifically the dissemination of obscene material through the postal service; obscenity laws persisted even after his death in 1915. In the 1970s, Protestant fundamentalists incited a third awakening, embraced by the Republican Party that coveted the voting power of the Moral Majority. Stone enlivens his narrative with deft portraits of the many judges involved in cases on obscenity, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Some Supreme Court justices, appointed to uphold the views of the Christian right, disappointed their constituencies. The author applauds decisions that reflect the "protection of human dignity and equality" and believes, maybe too optimistically, that religious groups are now "on the defensive." A compelling history of a nation grappling with the moral and legal freedoms that the founders strived to ensure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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