Time to revisit the GOP's latest 'religious freedom' law targeting women and LGBTQ Americans

The First Amendment Defense Act has been hanging around for a while but it's time to give it another look since it will almost surely make it on to next year's congressional agenda. It’s written to be used broadly by people to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people based on both their sexual orientation and sexual conduct. Jay Michaelson writes:

If it becomes law, FADA will be the worst thing to happen to women and LGBT people in a generation.

Like state “religious freedom restoration acts,” FADA’s basic principle is that it’s not discrimination when businesses discriminate against LGBT people if they have a religious reason for doing so. The most famous situations have to do with marriage: wedding cake bakers who say that if they bake a cake, they’re violating their religion; Kim Davis, the government clerk who said that signing a secular marriage certificate was a religious act that she could not perform.

But those stories are a red herring. The more important cases are ones like hospitals refusing to treat LGBT people (or their children), pharmacies refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, businesses refusing to offer health benefits to a same-sex partner, and state-funded adoption agencies refusing to place kids with gay families.  Underneath the rhetorical BS, that’s what FADA is all about.

The law provides protections to any business, agency, or individual so that it can be used by entities ranging from Hobby Lobby to hospitals to infamous marriage denier Kim Davis.