A priest, a rabbi and half a dozen nuns walked into the Indiana Statehouse last Thursday. The punch line: Mike Pence.

Indiana’s Republican governor has become the left’s favorite punching bag after passing a Religious Freedom Restoration Act last Thursday at a ceremony featuring a number of conservative religious leaders.


“Many people of faith feel their religious liberty is under attack by government action,” Pence warned. The law, he said, ensures that “government action will always be subject to the highest level of scrutiny.”

The bill’s backers say it’s almost identical to any of the 19 other RFRA laws currently on the books, including for the federal government and in deep blue states like Illinois and Connecticut. Critics counter that this bill’s specific language, when coupled with Indiana’s lack of a civil rights law protecting LGBT citizens, makes it a vehicle for discrimination. They say it would allow businesses to deny services to gay and lesbian couples by claiming a religious compulsion.

But regardless of the bill’s effect — many legal experts say it changes little by itself — it has become the latest battle in the culture wars: a proxy fight between liberals hoping to ride the wave of increased support for marriage equality and conservatives shoring up evangelicals enraged by the LGBT movement’s nationwide successes.

Even before the bill was signed, pro-LGBT advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Freedom to Marry were sounding the alarm to their deep ranks of supporters, urging them to oppose the law as they had successfully fought similar legislation in Arizona. These groups, which as recently as 2004 couldn’t stop same-sex marriage bans from passing in 11 states, including bright-blue Oregon, are flush with cash and feeling the support of the nearly 6 in 10 Americans who support marriage equality, not to mention the almost universal backing of coastal elites.

The backlash intensified quickly. Hillary Clinton jumped in the ring, tweeting that she was “sad” and that “we shouldn’t discriminate against ppl bc of who they love #LGBT.” Singer Miley Cyrus was blunter: She called Pence an “asshole.” The CEOs of Yelp and Salesforce said they would scale back investments in Indiana, and Apple CEO Tim Cook excoriated the new law in an op-ed for The Washington Post. San Francisco’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned state-funded travel to Indiana. Even the NCAA, which is set to hold its Final Four Saturday in Indianapolis, said it would “closely examine” the law’s implication to see if it puts the organization’s inclusive values at risk.

All of this is a sign, said prominent gay rights activist Steve Elmendorf, that while gay rights was once a wedge issue employed by Republicans, it’s now most potent when employed in the other direction. “It’s not just Democrats and progressives” that take issue with the law, he said, “it’s the mainstream business community.”

Pence defended the law in a rocky appearance on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, saying that the outrage was based on “misinformation and misunderstanding.” Grilled by host George Stephanopoulos, he argued that the legislation is no different than the federal bill passed under President Bill Clinton in 1993 and the bill Barack Obama helped pass while serving in the Illinois Legislature. All told, Pence dodged five pointed yes-or-no questions about the bill’s implications and another few about whether he would support a statewide anti-discrimination law for LGBT citizens, retreating to platitudes about Indiana’s “Hoosier hospitality.”

By late Monday, a number of potential 2016 candidates such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson were lining up behind Pence and providing political cover.

But their support did little to take the heat off. Pence canceled two public appearances for Monday and Tuesday, choosing the friendlier confines of The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, where he reiterated that he “abhor[s] discrimination.”

Beyond the politics of the issue — which showcases the pro-LGBT rights movement as a force to be reckoned with, and not just in its blue-state strongholds — is the murky complexity of the law itself.

Indiana’s RFRA bill, much like that of many other states and the federal government, specifies that the government must have a “compelling interest” in order to infringe on an individual’s religious practice.

For the past two decades, the majority of RFRA cases have dealt with minority religious groups. The Amish have used it to argue against putting a bright orange triangle on their buggies and Jehovah’s Witnesses have used it to argue for an exemption to state law so they can receive specialized medical care, paid for by the state, that doesn’t employ blood transfusions. The federal bill’s origins involved Native Americans’ right to use peyote — not Catholics battling the government over abortion.

But Indiana’s RFRA bill specifies that it applies in private lawsuits in addition to cases in which the government compels citizens, whereas many other states are ambiguous on the subject. (Pence mistakenly told Stephanopoulos that his bill did not apply to private lawsuits.)

Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia who consulted on the federal RFRA bill passed in 1993, said that the federal bill and state bills that copied its language are indeed meant to apply to all types of lawsuits. But he said the arguments that the laws discriminate against gays are new; their original intention was solely to protect minority religious groups from government intrusion.

The so-called license to discriminate against LGBT people, Laycock said, comes solely from the fact that Indiana doesn’t consider them a protected class. “You don’t have to rely on a RFRA bill to discriminate against LGBT citizens” in a state like Indiana where gays are not specifically protected by law, Laycock said. “You just do it.”

“What they need is a gay rights law, not the defeat of RFRA,” he added.

Ira Lupu, an emeritus professor at the George Washington University Law School, noted that various municipalities in Indiana, including Bloomington and Indianapolis, already do consider LGBT citizens a protected class and thus will be affected by the new bill.

It’s an urban-rural divide mirrored in other Republican-leaning states like Texas and Arizona: Cities like Phoenix and San Antonio consider sexual orientation a protected class, while the state at-large does not.

Indiana’s RFRA bill, Lupu argues, permits courts to decide in favor of businesses discriminating against gay or lesbian customers by ruling that the municipalities do not have a “compelling interest” in enforcing these local laws. It remains to be seen whether or not they will actually do so.

Michele Jawando, a vice president at the Center for American Progress and former adviser to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), said lawsuits between businesses and individuals against whom they discriminate would muck up the legal system with cases pitting local citizens against each other. “What I’m hoping is that long term, other states will see what’s happening [in Indiana] and take pause,” she said.

But both sides of the legal debate agree the backlash largely consists of people oversimplifying or mischaracterizing the law for their own purposes.

“There’s considerable uncertainty about which side would win if there was a case involving a gay wedding” in a city like Bloomington, said Lupu. What’s clear is that “both sides have political motivations for their characterizations.”