In the 2011 Canadian National Housing Survey, 9,000 residents in this country listed their religion as Jedi. It sounds like a joke, but some of the people who marked down the option take it quite seriously—practising self-discipline and embodying values like charity.

If Jedi is in fact a religion whose members practise and sincerely believe, do they deserve protection under the Ontario Human Rights Code, though? It sounds like a slightly absurd question, but that issue—of how to decide which groups’ rights are officially protected—is one that will become increasingly important.

Consider: the Ontario Human Rights Commission recently expanded its definition of creed to “also include non-religious belief systems that, like religion, substantially influence a person’s identity, worldview and way of life.” Vegan advocates consequently suggested that they too should be protected under the province’s human rights code, arguing that actions such as making a vegan veterinarian-in-training put down a healthy animal should be subject to exemptions.

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Whether or not you believe the rights of vegans or similar groups deserve legal protection essentially boils down to two things: how you define creed, and what you believe are the purposes of a human rights code.

On defining creed, the commission’s recent redefinition suggests creed is a comprehensive, sincerely held worldview. At least at first glance that seems relatively reasonable. The purpose of a human rights code, however, may be less intuitive: namely, that the function of a human rights code is not to enforce equality, but to protect the marginalized from the effects of inequality – which is why they’re vital to a healthy democracy.

Last September, the commission released a report on preventing discrimination based on creed. The current human rights code does not explicitly define creed. But it seems fair to conclude from the report that the commission decided a clearer approach was necessary to protect human rights in the province after an uptick in the frequency and visibility of Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination.

The report is 173 pages long, but it hinges on one idea: defending human rights on the basis of creed “is a core part of what enables a diverse plural society such as ours to work.” Limiting itself to legal protection in five areas—housing, services, employment, contracts, unions and professional associations— the report essentially defines creed as a sincerely held belief, related to “ultimate questions of human existence,” that also has some “connection to an organization or community that professes a shared system of belief.”

Such a broad definition allows, for example, for protection for members of Falun Gong (often discriminated against by the Chinese government), even though it generally isn’t thought of as an organized religion.

The definition, however, is slippery—which is precisely why groups such as vegans also feel entitled to protection under the code. Ethical vegans arguably are a community organization sharing a belief, are sincere about that, and have beliefs that affect their day-to-day life. By that logic, veganism is a creed. Whether veganism is concerned with ultimate questions of existence is ambivalent, however—it seems one could make the argument either way—and in all likeliness would come down to the specific interpretation of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

If the argument gets that far, it will be a harbinger of more such cases to come. Although political beliefs are explicitly not protected under the code, the criteria used make it hard to understand why they aren’t. Libertarians, for example, are an established group, honestly believe in individual responsibility, and shape much of their lives in relation to that belief. If they are discriminated against—refusing, for example, to interact with the welfare state—perhaps they too should be subject to protection under the code. The issue is complicated by the fact that social significance is easier to attain using digital technologies. To wit: if, rather than a few pranksters, a million Jedis can gather collectively online, are they to be protected by the code as well?

It would therefore be easy to make a slippery-slope argument: if vegans get protection, then who’s next? But drawing the line between where state intervention is fair and where individual rights triumph is inherently subjective. When it comes to law or the state, there is only the slippery slope.

Perhaps the issue with vegans reflects a broader trend: that as organized religion wanes in influence, particularly among millennials, other systems of belief by which people organize their lives and worldviews will come into sharper focus. As that happens—as more and more people have systems of faith that cannot be neatly slotted into a familiar organized religion—how we define creed may again need examination. After all, while protection of marginalized groups is important, if the definition of creed becomes too broad, it is easy to imagine it being misused. And as Amanda Hohmann from B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights suggested, it could make more obvious cases of discrimination such as Islamophobia or anti-Semitism harder to punish.

Despite these difficulties human rights remain necessary, precisely because of how subjective the definitions are. In something like the human rights commission, we see that the purpose of such an organization is precisely to be “unfair”—that is, to focus on protecting the rights of minorities against a majority, while leaving the majority the rest of the legal and political system. Whether or not vegans receive human rights protection is less important than that more far-reaching idea: that marginalized groups always start off seeming illegitimate or strange, and their rights must be fought for by marginalized and fortunate alike.

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based in Toronto.