A Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bill has recently been considered by the Mississippi legislature. It has not received the firestorm of often-uninformed commentary that doomed the Arizona RFRA bill, perhaps because of all the attention focused on the Hobby Lobby case at the Supreme Court. But a group of law professors joined together in a letter condemning the Mississippi proposal.

Their letter notes the overwhelming support that the federal RFRA bill enjoyed in 1993-an extremely broad coalition that united to defend the principle of religious freedom, with no second-guessing about how the courts might rule in any particular contest between an asserted religious right and some other interest or right. RFRA does not give religious persons or organizations a free pass from laws and regulations, but only provides the opportunity to contest the government’s action (is its rule really needed? has the government picked the most appropriate way to assert its requirements?) if the person or organization can make a convincing case that it has a sincere religious belief that is substantially burdened by the government’s requirement.

But after passage of RFRA, as the scholars’ letter notes, “the civil rights community”–rather, initially, just the LGBT-rights community–asserted its concern that in contests between religious freedom claims and LGBT-rights claims, the religious persons or organizations might often win–i.e., the courts would rule that their religious freedom was wrongly being suppressed.

The possibility of such outcomes–that courts would find reason to vindicate religious freedom over LGBT rights in some instances–has been the cause of growing opposition to RFRA, both the federal law and the state RFRAs (state RFRAs are needed because of a Supreme Court case that ruled Congress could not make the federal RFRA apply to state governments).

Thus also this letter: because a Mississippi RFRA might lead Mississippi courts sometimes to rule that an LGBT anti-discrimination provision wrongly is curtailing religious freedom, these scholars urge rejection of the proposed RFRA law. To these scholars, it seems, religious freedom claims should never win over the assertion of LGBT rights; there should be no balancing but only a limitation on religious freedom.

That’s more than discouraging all by itself. But there is also another discouraging element in this effort to derail the Mississippi RFRA bill, as noted by church-state expert Thomas Berg. He points out that Mississippi actually has no state or local laws banning sexual orientation discrimination–so no LGBT protection that RFRA might, in some instances, overturn. The letter writers want to stop a law based on a concern that is only hypothetical.

And yet, as Berg notes, there are real religious freedom issues in Mississippi that a RFRA would rightly address: a Mississippi RFRA law “would protect religious minorities, many of them non-Christians, against laws passed in a state whose officials have frequently shown indifference or hostility to minorities. These cases ought to matter far more to liberals than the completely hypothetical conflicts with nonexistent civil-rights laws.”

Protection of disfavored religions and the appropriate balance of religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws: these are real religious freedom issues that need serious discussion-neither neglect (as in this instance) nor misleading commentary (the Arizona instance).