Whether or not Republican lawmakers think so.

The suffering of extremely religious therapists whose faith calls upon them to turn away LGBT clients keeps too many of us awake at night

Seriously, though, this is what Republicans, in Tennessee at least, think they should be spending their time on? Tennessee’s not alone either. Mississippi and North Carolina have also passed laws recently that—in the guise of addressing such pressing issues as the freedom of wedding cake bakers and the supposed rash of bathroom gender impersonators—further demonstrate the Republican Party’s obsession with discriminating against teh gays. House Republicans, at least those on the Armed Services Committee, don’t want to be left out of the fun either. One locality, however, takes the proverbial gay wedding cake. Oxford, Alabama will now punish an adult (other than one accompanying a small child) who goes into the “wrong” bathroom with either a $500 fine or six months in jail.

Here’s the thing: Those policies are far from the top of the list of priorities our politicians should be addressing, at least according to the American people—and that includes conservatives. Gallup does a monthly, open-ended poll asking: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” The issue of religious liberty doesn’t register at all, and the broader category of “religious decline”—even with Gallup lumping it together with “moral and ethical decline” (the latter of which could certainly include progressives and others who would recoil at anti-LGBT discrimination)—averaged only a few percent between January and April.

How about the question of how important the positions of the presidential candidates are to voters? Gallup tackled that one as well earlier this year, listing 15 issues and asking voters whether they considered them either extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not important. For Republicans specifically, “social issues such as abortion and gay rights” scored second from the bottom. Only climate change scored lower, but that’s an issue for another day.

Finally, another Gallup poll from this January found that 60 percent of Americans—including a majority (54 percent) of Republicans—are either very or somewhat satisfied with the “acceptance of gays and lesbians in the nation.” That overall rate of satisfaction is up from 41 percent to 60 percent in just the last four years. This poll, remember, was conducted before the most recent spate of anti-LGBT laws, and thus reflects the environment after the Supreme Court decision recognizing marriage equality as a constitutional right.

Yet somehow, in state after state, Republican elected officials are pushing hard in the opposite direction, a direction even those voters participating in the GOP nomination contest seem to reject. That’s what I’ve been thinking about this week, after Tennessee stepped up to protect the right of therapists to abandon all compassion.