It seems Indiana RFRA isn't going to legalize discrimination. I see it as an act to protect people's 1st amendment rights. The government seems to want to infringe upon those rights more and more. It appears RFRA isn't hurting the economy either; it's the

1. So let’s say that as a tenet of your religious faith, you believe, as many people do, that it is wrong for women to drive cars. You have the first amendment right to say that you think it’s wrong for women to drive cars, and since the U.S. currently affords the full protection of the first amendment to corporations, if you are a car dealership you can also put ads in newspapers saying it’s wrong for women to drive cars, protest NASCAR races that Danica Patrick participates in, etc.

But as a car dealership that believes it is wrong for women to drive, you cannot refuse to sell a car to a woman, because it is illegal in Indiana (and everywhere else in the U.S.) to discriminate against people because of their sex, their race, or their religion. These are called “protected classes,” but sexual orientation and gender identity are not protected classes in Indiana (or in most other states). So to be clear, the RFRA law in Indiana does offer people a legal justification for discriminating against LGBT people.

I don’t think a person or organization should be allowed to discriminate against LGBT people any more than they should be allowed to discriminate against anyone else. I believe it should be as illegal to refuse to rent an apartment to a trans person as it is to refuse to sell a car to a woman. This doesn’t seem radical to me. It seems, like, super obvious.

And yes, that will inevitably infringe upon some people’s freedom of expression. It’s true that in the U.S. you can’t freely express your belief that women shouldn’t work by refusing to hire them. But I don’t think the freedom of the powerful to legally oppress the marginalized is the kind of freedom we want.

2. I don’t see how one can debate whether it’s bad for the economy to discriminate against certain sectors of the work force. Of course it is. It’s always bad economics to tell a certain group of people, “You can’t participate fully in the economy,” because it definitionally inhibits economic growth.