Episode Details

Hugh talks to Ronan McCrea, professor of constitutional and European law at University College London, about his new book, The End of the Gay Rights Revolution. McCrea believes that the achievements of the most successful civil rights movement of the last few decades may be more politically fragile than most people assume. He argues that these successes were largely an incidental dividend of the wider sexual revolution rather than a standalone victory. What law and culture give quickly, he says, they can also take away.

The book traces the shift from decriminalisation to equality, the AIDS-era turn to pragmatism, and the post-marriage-equality problem of purpose. McCrea contends that movement overreach, mission creep to ever-broader agendas, and a reluctance to confront awkward truths leaves freedoms exposed to changing demographics, populism and a revived moral conservatism. The conversation asks what a strategy of consolidation rather than perpetual expansion would actually look like and whether it carries costs as well as benefits in a world where history rarely moves in straight lines.

The End of The Gay Rights Revolution is published by Polity.

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