This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 2nd, 2015, and Caleb Brown.

The debate over Indiana and other states religious freedom restoration acts has been reduced

to the idea that either you must oppose discrimination and therefore want

to ban it, or you must support discrimination and want it enshrined in law. Molly Hemingway is a senior editor at the Federalist. She argues that

contemporary discussions about religious liberty are at best terribly confused.

The basics of what religious freedom bills do have been wrongly articulated and the reaction from people about legislation that is actually quite good at the federal and state level. We've had religious freedom

bills for more than 20 years and they've been used as a way for people to fight

against government encroachment. But the way that we discussed this just led to mass hysteria and it's a shame because religious liberty legislation that balances

individual rights against legitimate government interest is an important

thing to have in a free society.

I think what most people who are broadly opposed to the law, to the extent that they know that this debate is taking

place.

Here the word discrimination and view these laws as institutionalizing it like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple did.

Yeah, what people have been doing and discussing these bills is they come up with these

imaginary scenarios that exist in their head about how they work out.

And what's missing from this discussion are people like Kowal Tagore, the Sikh woman who used religious freedom legislation to get justice

when she was fired by the IRS for carrying a small emblem of her Sikh faith.

Or Robert Soto, who's the guy who won the most recent religious freedom case just

a couple weeks ago, who used the legislation to get back sacred eagle feathers that the government

had taken from him.

It is also true that there is a collision between sexual liberty and religious liberty

and that people are trying to navigate that conflict.

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