"Religious Freedom"

For some. This article by Eric Ethington on Utah's "breakthrough" gay-inclusive civil rights legislation lays the whole strategy out very clearly:

That's why, when just a few weeks ago Oaks held a press conference to announce that he and the Mormon church were ready to endorse a statewide nondiscrimination law for LGBTQ people if only the leaders of the local LGBTQ community would sit down and negotiate a “compromise,” many were suspicious.

Oaks was up front about what he was looking for. He and other leaders of the Mormon church enumerated the religious exemptions they wanted included with a nondiscrimination law, including a right for government and health care workers to deny service to LGBTQ people.

SB296, the bill that resulted from those negotiations, was hailed by equality groups and the Mormon church as a “historic compromise” of nondiscrimination and religious freedom. The bill does indeed ban workplace and housing discrimination against LGBTQ people in Utah. But buried underneath those important protections, is a small clause guaranteeing the right of individuals to express faith-based anti-LGBTQ views at work.

This is similar to bills passed in other states, which include similar provisions, although not as explicit, allowing "people of faith" to avoid obeying laws they don't like -- specifically, ant-discrimination laws.

Maggie Gallagher's on board with this, among others. In a laughable attempt to establish that sexual orientation is a choice, she inserted this little nugget:

The place to rest our case for equal treatment of traditional believers is that actions are choices, choices which in a free society must be subject to moral reflections, not policed as if they were skin color, something over which the individual has no control.

(Emphasis added.)

That gives the whole game away, although Gallagher, still trying to present herself as the "reasonable" face of anti-gay bigotry, is doing her part to reinforce the "Christian martyr" mantra.

Ethington's essay is a "must read." Gallagher's is garbage.