This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 1st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The new fight over Religious Freedom Restoration Act statutes passed in 19 states as one that

conveniently ignores the basic right of free association

enshrined in the First Amendment.

Cato Institute Vice President for Legal Affairs, Roger Pallon, argues that the key distinction

on matters of religious liberty and discrimination

is the difference between rights and values.

It's been quite a week of battle between proponents of religious liberty and proponents of

non-discrimination. In fact, one cannot help but think that this has a lot to do with the final four, which is going

to be held in Indianapolis.

One cannot help but think that the LGBT community in particular saw this opportunity because we've seen

quite a firestorm over the past few days.

For example, a friend of mine in Chicago told me that the Chicago Tribune over the weekend

had stories about the Indiana bill on the front page and the opinion pages on the sports pages the

business pages the entertainment pages and so forth all of which has brought to the

four the conflict between these two strains of our law.

And so I suppose the first question is, if we want to protect religious liberty why is it that the First Amendment

isn't sufficient for that and it turns out that the reason is is because since

that amendment was ratified we have had a surfeit of legislation,

federal, state, and local, all of which implicates the government in actions that in principle and in fact can often compromise

religious liberty.

...