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Chapter 5 analyzes the jurisprudential line from Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell v. Hodges and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—decisions crafted mainly by Justice Anthony Kennedy—to build a multifaceted critique of dignity. We suggest that the Court’s deployment of dignity proves problematic especially in the hands of an ascendant conservative legal movement and especially as the Court has manipulated its suspect class and suspect classification doctrines. Decisions that have decriminalized same-sex intimacy and recognized marriage equality rest on a foundation of dignity, and legal scholars have lauded this reasoning as holistic and principled. Yet because this line of decisions conceptualizes dignity as an individual characteristic as well as a universal good, it renders unnecessary any deep engagement with the context, history, structure, and systems of inequality.

Masterpiece, initiated as Masterpiece Theatre in 1971 and still running today, remains one of the most successful examples of transnational coproduction between the United States and Britain. This chapter assesses the show’s impact on television culture on both sides of the Atlantic by examining the strategies it has devised over the years to negotiate issues of national identity, cultural heritage, and differing institutional structures, both within the television texts and behind the scenes. More broadly, it interrogates the history and concept of “transnational” in television in order to explore what is at stake when the specifically national mandate of public television systems is placed in tension with an ongoing transnational practice, and how audiences, critics, policymakers, and scholars have responded.

In the world of apprentices, journeymen, and masters, a masterpiece was a test piece completed as part of a claim to a master’s level of skill and status. In formal guilds there could be elaborate examinations, in which submitting a masterpiece was part of the process. In the Naples conservatories, advanced students could compose a large sacred work for chorus and instruments to demonstrate a professional level of skill. In between the masters who gave lessons to the conservatory children and the child apprentices who learned those lessons were a middle level of teaching assistants called “little masters” (mastricelli or maestrini). These were selected from advanced students who had passed qualifying examinations.

This chapter considers whether the church-in-law can be otherwise. Through a reading of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the chapter considers the possibility of a churchstate jurisprudence focused on collaborative justice.

Continuing the historical narrative, chapter 3 describes the post-Soviet saga of those who led Yakutia in a quest to bring olonkho back from being “forgotten.” Beginning with the stirrings of cultural revitalization in the early 1990s, the story continues in a gripping narrative of their race for a coveted prize—UNESCO’s recognition of olonkho as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. In addition to describing changes in olonkho reception since the UNESCO award, including its transformation from an oral tradition to a literature-based art form, this chapter explores the genre’s connection to Sakha language revitalization and the role of youth in the revival of olonkho.

Research into the key factors in olonkho revitalization reveals a remarkable consistency among Sakha voices, pointing toward the pivotal role of UNESCO’s Masterpiece program and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). For this reason, chapter 4 focuses exclusively on UNESCO and its ICH initiatives. Topics include a description of the Masterpiece proclamation and its absorption into other ICH programs, a clarification of the term “safeguarding,” a comparison between UNESCO’s desired outcomes and Yakutia’s Action Plan for olonkho revitalization, and a discussion of Yakutia’s funding for that Action Plan in the face of budgetary crises.

There have been three competing approaches to the interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. One is that the Free Exercise Clause should protect religious belief but not religious conduct. Another is that any law that directly or indirectly burdens religious liberty should be subjected to “strict scrutiny” by judges and rarely upheld. A final approach says that the Constitution should prohibit laws that are motivated by animus toward religion or that interfere with core questions of religious doctrine, worship, or membership, but that otherwise religious individuals must follow neutral laws of general applicability. The chapter outlines arguments in favor of this latter approach and then applies this approach to cases involving religious business owners who wish to be exempted from laws requiring the provision of health benefits to employees and laws prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination in public accommodations.

This chapter analyzes Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which held that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed animosity and hostility toward the religion of baker Jack Phillips. This case shows that rhetoric matters: the commissioners drew criticism for their comments about appealing to religion to justify discrimination. The chapter analyzes the arguments made in Masterpiece, highlighting competing appeals to Obergefell and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kennedy’s majority opinion enlisted civil rights precedent Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises on the general rule that religious objections to gay marriage do not allow business owners to deny service to customers protected by public accommodations law. Masterpiece indicated guidelines for resolving future cases. The concurring opinion by Justice Bosson in Elane Photography, LLC v. Willock provides a valuable model: it speaks respectfully about religious beliefs, while also explaining what tolerance demands in the public square as the “price of citizenship.”

This chapter surveys the history of obscenity in English jurisprudence, from the invention of obscene libel as a crime in the eighteenth century through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and its 1959 reform. It draws on Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to argue that the invention of obscenity, and its subsequent definitions and redefinitions, reflect changes in media ecology and technology. It begins by examining the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, before surveying the history of obscenity, and concluding with readings of the way the technologically mediated character of obscenity is reflected in both James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

This chapter reviews the Supreme Court’s free exercise decisions and doctrines from its 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith until the present. The Court moved away from a pro-exemption position to one that emphasized government neutrality and, in 1990, ruled that religious objectors are not constitutionally entitled to judicially created exemptions. Almost immediately, however, the Court emphasized that the First Amendment’s free exercise clause does not permit discrimination on the basis of religion, and this prohibition has increasingly been treated by the Court as a requirement that regulations must be carefully reviewed. Recent cases involving funding for religious schools, public-health restrictions on religious gatherings, and conflicts between antidiscrimination law and religious freedom rights are presented. Also discussed is the continuing application of a strict scrutiny standard of review under state and federal statutes, including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

The chapter explores the successful meeting of “mainstream trends” and “masterpiece traditions” in the commissioning and production of Downton Abbey (2010–2015), and the way in which this “postheritage drama” marks a significant transatlantic encounter between different broadcasting cultures and storytelling traditions. Drawing on recent research on the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States in television drama, the analysis first details how this period drama became a collaboration between the commercial UK broadcaster ITV and the American PBS station WGBH and its Masterpiece series. The chapter then investigates how the long-form narrative with soap opera elements was designed to tap into the UK tradition of heritage drama, while drawing on the speed and storytelling style of US television series. The chapter closes with a discussion of Downton Abbey’s production story in relation to the series’ remarkable popularity in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond.

Should religious people who conscientiously object to facilitating same-sex weddings, and who therefore decline to provide cakes, photography, or other services, be exempted from antidiscrimination laws? This issue has taken on an importance far beyond the tiny number who have made such claims. Gay rights advocates fear that exempting even a few religious dissenters would unleash a devastating wave of discrimination. Conservative Christians fear that the law will treat them like racists and drive them to the margins of American society. Both sides are mistaken. This is not a matter of abstract principle, and none of the constitutional claims work. This is an appropriate occasion for legislative negotiation. This book is the only systematic accounting of the interests that must be balanced in any decent compromise, in terms that both sides can recognize and appreciate. This book explains the basis of antidiscrimination law, including the complex idea of dignitary harm. It shows why even those who do not regard religion as important or valid nonetheless have good reasons to support religious liberty, and why those who regard religion as a value of overriding importance should nonetheless reject the extravagant power over nonbelievers that the Supreme Court has recently embraced. The book also proposes a specific solution to the problem: that religious exemptions be granted only to the few businesses that are willing to announce their compunctions and bear the costs of doing so—an approach makes room for America’s enormous variety of deeply held beliefs and ways of life.

Religious accommodations have been granted only when this can be done without defeating the purposes of the law. This chapter examines the purposes of antidiscrimination law. That body of law is an exception to the normal rule of contract at will. Generally, one may refuse to deal for any reason at all. Legislation is only necessary when discrimination is ubiquitous. The law can thus achieve its ends while excusing idiosyncratic dissenters. The harms that have been attributed to discrimination, such as damage to full citizenship status and dignitary harm, are carefully unpacked.

Some have claimed that accommodation is mandated by free speech. In the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado case, the Supreme Court was offered an impressive array of variations on this claim. Mostly they are bad arguments. Although merchants have the right to announce their disagreement with the law, speech principles cannot resolve the controversy. Free speech could be construed to protect businesses that produce expressive media, such as (some) photographers, but it can’t intelligibly be stretched to help others with equally pressing conscience claims, such as bakers. It thus addresses the issue in a morally arbitrary way.