Political Research Associates, which proclaims as its mission producing “investigative research and analysis on the U.S. Right to support social justice advocates and defend human rights”–or more briefly, “challenging the right, advancing social justice”–earlier this year published “Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights,” a report by Jay Michaelson.

Religious freedom defenders would do well to read the report, because it lays out clearly an increasingly popular argument: when religious people and organizations seek an exemption from an anti-discrimination law, they are not really seeking freedom to exercise their own faith (for example, by creating an organization that embodies a biblical sexual ethic) but rather simply requesting permission to oppress people different than themselves.

Michaelson is too good a scholar to make the argument quite so crudely; for example, he admits (with puzzlement) that various highly respected constitutional scholars, such as Douglas Laycock, have agreed that anti-discrimination laws sometimes do wrongly suppress religious freedom, and he states, “The free exercise of religion is, itself, a civil right,” so that the real issue is how different civil rights should be simultaneously honored or balanced.

But his basic argument is that whenever LGBT or reproductive rights advance, religious freedom rightly is pushed back. The current coordinated right-wing campaign (as he labels it) that purports simply to protect religious freedom is really part of a master strategy to impose Christian values on the nation.

And yet, for religious persons or organizations to plead for the freedom to maintain for themselves and in their organizations their faith-shaped practices and conduct guidelines is hardly the same thing as seeking to impose those practices and guidelines on everyone else!

Of course it is true that if a religious organization is free to consider religion in hiring then applicants who don’t share that religion will be turned away-and yet there are multiple other employers with very different job qualifications. Of course it is true that if a faith-based adoption agency insists on placing children only with religious mother-father married families, a single person, a gay couple, or a cohabiting heterosexual couple will be turned away from that one agency-and yet there are multiple other adoption services, many of which explicitly seek to serve gay persons.

Laws that would require the religious organization to ignore religion when hiring or that would force the adoption agency to place children without regard to sexual orientation, religion, or marital status necessarily suppress religious freedom, even if the laudable goal is simply to advance other civil rights. Saying that such laws are required in order to end discrimination is to say that religious freedom can be suppressed whenever the government disapproves of what various religious persons and organizations believe their religion requires them to do. That’s no balance, that’s not respect for religious exercise.