Salon.com | The Bill of Rights: "The passage is more than wonderful literature. Only when Huck let his mind travel did he discover what he really thought about equality. The First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression, allows that free flight, that necessary journey of self-discovery. In the words of one of its staunchest champions, Justice Hugo L. Black, that amendment -- along with the nine others that make up the Bill of Rights -- protects, or attempts to protect, 'individual liberty by barring government from acting in a particular area or from acting except under certain prescribed procedures.' Its framers had seen numerous examples of human depravity, abuses of governmental power by colonial authorities, that led them to build indestructible walls limiting government.

The Bill of Rights gives hope because it is based on hope and on the belief in potential human virtue. Along with the U.S. Constitution, it inaugurated a new regime in human affairs."

Queer Matters home: "Queer Matters is a major international, interdisciplinary conference, organized by the School of Humanities at King's College London, with the involvement of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University.

Queer Matters has been conceived with the aim of interrogating the Anglo-American divide in queer work (both in the academy and beyond), as well as providing a forum for international exchange on topics related to queer practices of all kinds. We envisage the event as an opportunity to take stock of the place of 'queer' in contemporary culture, to consider the differing discourses of queerness that arise in particular locales, and to address the theoretical and political issues that arise from such inquiries."