The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) made quite a splash last week when they announced they would support a law banning discrimination against LGBTQ people – with one condition.

Some analysts hailed the move. A few headlines writers even got a little carried away and asserted that the church had endorsed gay rights or forged a compromise that other conservative religious groups could use.

Not really. You see, the devil is always in the details, and in this case, a very, very large devil is lurking in those details.

Remember that one condition I mentioned? It would grant any religious person the right to ignore the LGBTQ rights law if they had a religious objection to it. How do you suppose that’s going to play out in Utah, a state that is 70 percent Mormon?

So, if you’re gay and want to rent a room in a bed-and-breakfast with your legal spouse (same-sex marriage is currently legal in Utah), you can – unless the owner doesn’t want you there. If you and your partner are planning your wedding and want to lease that really nice hall that the guy down the road rents out for money, you can – unless he decides your wedding offends his faith.

What if you lose your job because your boss finds out you’re gay or transgendered? You’re protected—unless the boss cites his religion. Then you lose.

This is one of those “compromises” where one sides gets the entire cake, and the other side gets a few crumbs that just happen to have fallen off of it. The Mormon plan would essentially codify the Religious Right’s current argument – that religious beliefs should always trump other secular laws – into the nation’s legal code. No thanks.

Writing on the Huffington Post, Brooke P. Hunter said it well: “The new Mormon position is like that candy with a razor blade inside that your mom warned you about on Halloween. While calling for LGBTQ people to be protected from those who hate them for non-religious reasons (and who are those people, anyway?), they have hidden their real agenda, which is to legalize such discrimination by anyone who claims their prejudice is backed by faith.”

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to examine the issue of same-sex marriage, the nation needs a serious proposal to deal with the issues that will arise should the high court extend marriage equality nationwide.

The Mormon proposal isn’t it.

What would a real compromise look like? How about this:

If you work for the government, you are required to serve same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples equally. If you are the county clerk, you must grant marriage licenses to all couples who meet the legal definition for marriage. If you’re not willing to do that, quit your job.

If you are a member of the clergy, you (and only you) get to decide which couples you will unite in marriage. If you don’t want to perform a marriage for a same-sex couple because it offends your church’s beliefs, you don’t have to. Period. Full stop.

If you run a secular, for-profit company that offers services to the general public, you must serve everyone equally. You cannot have a policy that overtly or effectively denies services to entire classes of people when those people are protected by anti-discrimination laws. (“I don’t serve blacks.” “I don’t serve Jews.” “I don’t serve gays.”)

Does this mean someone who owns a hotel, a photography studio or a bakery must serve everyone under all circumstances? No. But if you are going to deny service, you need a reason unrelated to that person’s protected status.

If a guest checks into a hotel, gets drunk and starts tearing up the room, the owner can have him removed. If a couple asks a photographer to shoot their wedding 75 miles away and the photographer doesn’t care to drive that far, she can say no to the job. If a baker is asked to put a swastika on a cake and doesn’t feel comfortable doing that, he can turn down that specific job. (But if his policy is “no cakes for Muslims,” that won’t fly.)

In a real compromise, both sides give up a little to achieve a larger, desirable goal. What the Mormons have offered isn’t a compromise because they get everything they want with very little risk.

Move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here.