This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Protecting religious liberty means protecting a broad range of activities,

and it means protecting the rights of all groups of people to express their faith or lack thereof without government interference.

Douglas Lacock is a professor of both law and religious studies at the University of Virginia.

At a Cato conference held last week, he discussed what religious liberty means and

how courts should treat it.

For many years I've been urging the two sides in America's culture wars to respect the liberty to the other side,

to concentrate on protecting their own liberty, and to spend much less time and need to mostly

give up on regulating the liberty of their opponents.

And it's not just about sex, but it's heavily about sex.

I warned of the Puritan mistake, which we heard a little bit about this morning.

The Puritans came to Massachusetts for religious liberty and immediately established

that they meant religious liberty for themselves.

Anyone else had the liberty to go anywhere in the world outside Massachusetts,

and that was quite enough liberty for the likes of them.

I'm more practical than most academics. I do argue cases in the courts, but on this I'm utterly

impractical. An academic voice crying in the wilderness, no one on either side has paid me the slightest mind.

But I'll try once more, maybe to a friendlier audience.

It didn't always use to be this way. So some of you remember and some of you were too young

That the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed in 1993 with bipartisan support.

The sponsors in the Senate were Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy.

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