Shortly before Easter, Laura Kelly, the governor of Kansas and a Democrat, issued an order banning gatherings of ten or more people, including in churches, as a protective measure against the spread of the novel coronavirus. Soon thereafter, the Kansas legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, overturned the order. Susan Wagle, the Senate President, speaking about religious Kansans, said that the order “was a violation of their constitutional rights to have the government tell them that they cannot participate in a church service.” The Kansas Supreme Court ultimately upheld the governor’s order, on procedural grounds, but on Saturday Judge John Broomes, a Donald Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order on Governor Kelly’s order, for two churches. The story was the same in Louisville, Kentucky, where a federal judge had banned that city’s government from enforcing social distancing at Easter services. As the judge put it, “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter.”

Justin Walker, the judge in the Kentucky case, is a notable figure. He’s a protégé of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, and President Trump just nominated him to the D.C. Circuit, a traditional stepping stone to the Supreme Court. As Ian Millhiser points out, in Vox, Walker may have misrepresented the facts of the case, because he was so anxious to preen on the issue. (For example, Walker said that the congregants in Louisville were threatened with arrest and prosecution; the city’s mayor said that that was not true.) Walker was using the Louisville Easter case to burnish his credentials on the hottest issue in the conservative movement: religious freedom.

“Religious freedom,” in its current incarnation, has little to do with religion or freedom. Rather, it’s a payoff to a privileged political constituency, usually at the expense of others. William Barr, the Attorney General, is at the center of this effort, which he kicked off with a fire-breathing speech at Notre Dame last year. (I wrote about the speech here.) In a key passage, Barr said, “Militant secularists today do not have a live-and-let-live spirit—they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.” Translated, this means that the rest of society—including the government—must accommodate the religious beliefs of others, even if it means violating the rights supposedly guaranteed to all. These religious groups want special privilege, not equal treatment under the law—and the Trump Administration wants to indulge their political desires. Indeed, after a showy display of federal displeasure from Barr’s Justice Department, the city of Greenville, Mississippi, backed down on a ban on drive-in religious services.

“Religious freedom” is an Administration-wide initiative, and there’s no doubt about the primary target: the L.G.B.T.Q. community. In not only the Justice Department but also in the Education and Labor Departments, the government is trying to make it easier to discriminate against gay people. Earlier this year, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, issued proposed regulations that would allow discrimination against gay people at virtually any private university. Current law says that educational institutions “controlled by a religious organization” may be exempt from certain anti-discrimination rules. A religious school, for instance, may be allowed to restrict certain jobs to members of its faith. But, under DeVos’s new rule, any institution that says it “subscribes to specific moral beliefs or practices” would be exempt. As a group of Democratic senators noted in a letter to DeVos, the proposed rule would represent an attack on women as well as on gay people. “Enforcing the proposed factors as written would allow virtually any college or university to claim an exemption,” they wrote. “Individuals could be fired or not provided resources on the basis of their sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, all based on an organization’s self-defined religious tenets.”

In a similar vein, the Labor Department has proposed rules that would make it easier for companies to base employment decisions on religious criteria. Religious owners of businesses could fire gay people because they are gay, refuse to hire people because they are cohabitating outside of marriage, and avoid paying for contraception as part of their compensation packages. (The Supreme Court has already approved companies owned by religious people avoiding otherwise mandated coverage for birth control, in the Hobby Lobby case.) And the “religious freedom” agenda also includes allowing governments to subsidize church-run institutions, such as parochial schools. In the zero-sum world of government funding, of course, money that goes to parochial schools is not available to public schools—which are open to everyone.

In customary fashion, the conservative movement is planning for the long term when it comes to “religious freedom.” Over opposition from liberal students, the law schools at Harvard and Stanford recently opened clinics where students can represent real clients in “religious freedom” cases. The next generation of advocates and judges is moving into place.

A Guide to the Coronavirus