The State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, a body of some 15 academics, legal scholars, and nonprofit leaders advising Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about human rights, was announced in late May without input from human rights groups or even the department’s existing Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Its purpose is to “provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” and, according to its charter, to propose “reforms of human rights discourse.” Human rights advocates immediately worried that the commission wouldn’t help enforce human rights, but rather rein them in.

Natural law—a tradition comprising Ancient Greek philosophy, Catholic medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, and some Enlightenment-era social contract theory—in its classic form, argues that humanity has certain inherent “goods,” such as marriage or family, that are objective, universal, and, although inspired by God, also deducible through human reason, and therefore a proper basis for policy.

“According to this theory, God established a rational order to the universe, and the rules he has set are thereby ‘laws’ for all rational beings. Aiming at the natural goods for one’s species is thus commanded by God,” University of Wyoming political theory professor Brent Pickett told me.

But today, Pickett said, natural law theory is mostly used to justify differential treatment of LGBTQ people. In a 2004 critique, Pickett explained that, since the natural law view of sexuality holds that “sex must be related to a human ‘good’—in this case, the possibility of procreation—in order to be just,” its proponents commonly defend anti-LGBTQ policies from anti-sodomy laws to legal discrimination as grounded in human reason, rather than faith. The same rationales, he adds, are used to argue against contraception.

As a legal strategy, it’s a better bet than citing scripture. “It’s a way to achieve the same goals of religious conservatives without making clear that that’s what’s going on,” said Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way.