The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) is accepting comments through March 31, 2015, on draft regulations it has proposed for federal contractors to prohibit job discrimination on the basis of sex while promoting equal employment opportunities without regard to sex.

Does “Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs” sound just a bit familiar? That’s because this is the office charged with implementing President Obama’s Executive Order last summer that for the first time prohibited job discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity by federal contractors. Many faith-based organizations asked the president to exempt religious organizations from the new requirements; he did not, although he maintained the exemption in the federal contract rules that permits religious employers to consider religion when hiring and firing-creating great uncertainty about when a religious employer’s decisions are (legally) a matter of considering religion and when they are (illegally) a matter of considering sexual orientation. Criticism of the religious organizations for seeking a religious exemption (like the exemption the Senate had passed just the previous year, with full Democratic support) has blown up even into a challenge to the accreditation of Gordon College, an evangelical college whose president signed one of the letters requesting religious freedom protections.

By contrast with the new prohibitions of the Executive Order, job discrimination on the basis of sex has long been forbidden in federal contracting. The new draft regulations are meant in part simply to update the current regulations. But they are also intended to fully apply to federal contracting an expansive newer conception of “employment discrimination on the basis of sex.” Sex discrimination, according to DOL-following the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and some court decisions-now forbids not only treating men and women differently, but also taking adverse action against a transgender person, a person transitioning from one gender to another, and a person who goes against sexual stereotypes “by being in a relationship with a person of the same sex.” That is, forbidden discrimination on the basis of sex is now also to encompass in federal contracting discriminatory treatment on the basis of gender identity, transgender status, or even (same-sex) marital status. Or so go the draft regulations.

Nothing in the Notice of Proposed Rule Making about what the OFCCP will do about the predictable collision between the right of religious federal contractors to consider religion in making their employment decisions and the proposed enlarged definition of forbidden discrimination on the basis of sex.

Comments can be submitted through March 31.