Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of the Planets, in the final pages of which he had adopted a series of numbers from Plato’s Timaeus – a cosmological text earlier taken seriously by Kepler – to account for the ratios of the distances from the sun of the then known six planets of the solar system. While defenders of Hegel have usually toned down the extent of these claims, this chapter argues that Hegel’s reference to Plato’s Pythagorean cosmology must be taken seriously – not as cosmology, however, but as instantiating the logic appropriate for empirically based science. Hegel’s allusion to Plato’s mythologically expressed “syllogism” is consistent with his idea that logic as Plato conceived it allowed its application to the empirical world but that this applicability had been compromised by Aristotle adaptation of it. With the proper grasp of logic’s utilization of the category of “singularity” in its difference to “particularity” – available to Plato but not Aristotle – we can appreciate how, while Kepler’s Laws were empirically based, Newton’s were not as they relied on abstract entities that could not be justified empirically.

Shortly after Black Lives Matter protests broke out around the United States in the spring of 2020, a curious protest took place in the state of Texas. Organized in response to the Texas governor's coronavirus-related order to close businesses devoted primarily to the serving of alcohol, some Texas bar owners staged a “Bar Lives Matter” protest outside of the Texas State Capitol building in the city of Austin and others coordinated a lawsuit challenging the governor's order in U.S. federal court. This lawsuit instigated by the Texas Bar and Nightclub Alliance followed in the footsteps of other lawsuits brought by Christian churches around the nation challenging pandemic-related limitations on in-person religious services. In July 2020, responding in apparent disgust to the activities of devoted drinkers in Texas and elsewhere, the wellknown economist and liberal columnist Paul Krugman lamented the potentially deadly reopening situation facing U.S. schools and students in the coming fall, opining in The New York Times that “the reason we’re in this position is that states, cheered on by the Trump administration, rushed to allow large parties and reopen bars. In a real sense America drank away its children's future.”

In this concluding chapter on future directions in queer and religious political alliances, I aim to explore the pandemic pitting of bars against babies, and then too churches against children. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the constellation of competing interests present in the coronavirus pandemic—one of the defining moments of the Trump presidency— cannot be broken down along neat political affiliations or dispersed across predictable camps on either the left or right. Rather, what we have witnessed again is the crisscrossing of political, religious, and sexual interests defying easy categorization. During these times, indeed, it seems almost as if queer theorist Gayle Rubin's 1980s-era “bar dykes” managed to commandeer Texan nightlife and that Paul Krugman was writing for Phyllis Schlafly's conservative Eagle Forum rather than for The New York Times.

In this topsy-turvy situation, the possibility of new alliances between queer and religious groups has emerged. Indeed, as this chapter discusses, recent viruses—notably, HIV and coronavirus—have raised existential issues for queer and religious folk alike and instigated converging debates about sustaining community in the midst of mass human death.

With same-sex couples having gained marital recognition in a number of prominent jurisdictions around the globe, it might appear that the struggle for the legal recognition of nontraditional families is over. But that is not the case. There continue to be families not recognized by a multitude of legal systems, including nonconjugal unions of friends or relatives, polyamorous relationships of more than two persons, and various religious families (including polygamous ones). These families embody a queer resistance to normalcy in family life as they challenge through their lived experience “sexual regimes of normalization” (Cossman 2019, 25) and find themselves at odds with “the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (Halperin 1995, 62).

The misalignment between law and the reality of modern families continues with the effect that traditional (dyadic, heterosexual) marital families are prioritized when allocating benefits, rights, and obligations. This book explores counterintuitive ways of addressing this legal imbalance by staging an uncomfortable yet necessary conversation concerning a potentially conjoined queer–religious politics challenging “common-sense” (often majoritarian) norms and practices in family law. Such a politics requires looking beyond traditional allies, strategies, and discourses. We are especially intrigued by whether some religious groups might be allies in pluralizing family law in ways beneficial to queer politics. The intuition is that, when it comes to the legal regulation of intimate connections, certain religious subjectivities have more in common with those involved in queer politics than liberal politics.

A number of religious groups have shown an interest in promoting alternative family structures, which is a topos in queer activism as well. For example, with nondyadic unions, an oft-overlooked shared interest in overcoming the monogamous paradigm (commonly engrafted into state law) unites supporters of polyamory and polygamy. As a result, a common desire to overcome law's monogamous paradigm could unite queer polyamorists located in northern California, for example, with splinter “orthodox” Mormon communities living in Utah.

The potential for queer and religious groups to converge has occasionally been investigated before, especially in the U.S. context. For example, Andrew Koppelman's latest (2020) book on LGBT rights and religion has perceptively intervened into the ongoing debate over whether U.S.