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Arch Sex Behav (2007) 36:762763 DOI 10.1007/s10508-007-9228-6
BOOK REVIEW
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
By Michael Cobb. New York University Press, New York, 2006, 229 pp., $21.00.
Grace A. Epstein
Published online: 2 October 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
The relationship between psychology and rhetoric, initially fostered by Freuds analysis of the talking cure, continues today in the work of many linguists and textual scholars. This historical connection is deeply resonant in Cobbs discussion of the efcacy of rhetoric to reposition lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) people back into the American identity landscape after more than a decade of political and social exclusion. In fact, Cobb is especially articulate about how the religious right has successfully constrained the rights of LGBT citizens through well executed language acts. Foregrounding the work of Burke (1961) and Foucault (1990), Cobb deconstructs the campaign for Colorados Amendment 2, in which the electorate sought to remove LGBT persons from constitutional redress for discrimination. This event, along with the execution of Matthew Shepherd in Laramie, Wyoming, launches the books critique. Cobbs discussion of the campaign for Amendment 2 to permit discrimination against gay people in housing and employment provides the framework for how this discrimination became so swiftly formalized in the 1990s.
Drawing on the work of historian Miller (1953), who rst identied the literary form of the jeremiad, or fast sermon, as a meaningful element of Puritan community life, and that of literary critic Bercovitch (1978), whose analysis of the form focuses primarily on the jeremiads role in shaping national notions of American identity, Cobb explains:
...the act of condemning and lamenting the sins that had appeared in a community that was no longer as religious as it thought...