This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 31st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. The new Utah law governing discrimination and religious liberty was supposed to be a landmark compromise.

But as Cato Senior Fellow Walter Olson explains, the so-called Utah compromise doesn't strike

a balance so much as deepens government's involvement in otherwise free association.

There has been a lot of interest spurred by a new law passed by the Utah lettuce literature, which, according to its fans at least,

may neutralize the culture war on, that had been raging for years between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day

since otherwise known as the Mormons and gays and their advocates.

And this bad feeling goes back quite a long time when California passed its Proposition 8,

the Mormon Church was instrumental in organizing for it and has played an important role

in other states trying to prevent gays from getting married.

And Utah not too surprisingly as a state that is heavily influenced, if not totally dominated

by the church, was one of the many states that did not have any anti discrimination laws

on its books about sexual orientation.

That has now changed. The attitude of the Mormon Church has changed and they passed a bill which

enacted those anti-discrimination laws for private employment and housing in Utah and at the same

time added what were billed as religious liberty protections. This is why it's a compromise. The new language which was said to protect

the interests of religious believers in the workplace. So Harold as Americans working

out their problems in a centrist way, the Brooklyn Institution did a whole event on it.

You know, my friend Jonathan Rauch, who I ordinarily agree with, was very enthusiastic about it. So I took a look at it and my

opinion was very different from a Libertarian standpoint. I didn't like either half of

the Utah compromise. I think it's not really a way to get out of the

culture wars but potentially a way to get further into them and I think that it

...