The Equality Act, H.R. 5, adopted by the House of Representatives on February 25, 2021, and sent to the Senate for consideration, amends federal civil rights law to provide protection against discrimination to LGBT people across the nation. But, as written, it would protect LGBT rights at the great cost of significantly limiting protection for religious exercise and religious organizations. Congress should protect LGBT civil rights—but in a way that also protects the legitimate freedoms of other people and organizations. That way is the Fairness for All Act, H.R. 1440.

The Fairness for All (FFA) approach respects both LGBT rights and religious exercise rights. It acknowledges that many Americans have adopted a progressive ethic about marriage, sexuality, and gender while many other Americans hold historic convictions about these deep and basic matters. What to do about this big difference in convictions? In its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court said that governments must ensure fair treatment for LGBT persons—while also respecting religious exercise. Changes to federal civil rights laws to ensure that LGBT people can enjoy the same basic rights as other Americans must be carefully designed simultaneously to protect the legitimate rights of people and organizations that hold to a traditional sexual morality. Not all differential treatment is wrongful discrimination. For example, how a workplace should accommodate a pregnant woman differs from how the expectant father should be treated. Rights are not always mutually exclusive. Our nation’s commitment to individual freedom and to a diverse civil society—one full of distinctive private organizations—makes both-and solutions possible rather than the legal imposition of uniformity.

The Fairness for All approach is inspired by the collaboration of LGBT activists and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) in Utah in 2015 to craft protections simultaneously for LGBT people and for religious freedom. It is also inspired by current civil rights laws. These laws do not simply make illegal all differential treatment, but rather both prohibit and permit differences, depending on what the protected characteristic is, what the arena of action is (housing, employment, etc.), and what the reason for the different treatment is.

The Fairness for All Act, H.R. 1440, is the outcome. This bill is the fruit of more than five years of intensive discussions and negotiations among religious freedom advocates and LGBT rights advocates. The Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance has been an initiator and participant throughout the process. FFA would establish in law, across the major categories of civil rights law, the needed, careful, clarifying line between what should be regarded as wrongful discrimination and what should be accepted as permissible alternate patterns of action. Not every conflict can be anticipated and forestalled or mitigated by statute, to be sure, but the long and detailed discussions have revealed that many positive solutions are possible—arrangements that enable adherents of the contrasting sexual ethics to live side by side, dealing with their differences through persuasion rather than through courts and coercion.

Consider the following win-win arrangements detailed in the FFA bill.

FEMA, historic preservation, and security grants. In general, with FFA, LGBT nondiscrimination is required in programs funded by the federal government. For example, a faith-based organization that decides to participate in the Runaway and Homeless Youth program would, of course, serve all needing help, gay or straight. But other grants are not meant to fund services but rather to uphold every organization in specific circumstances. These include FEMA disaster recovery funds, nonprofit security grants for houses of worship and other entities vulnerable to hate crimes, and historic preservation funding. These are grants to enable diverse institutions to maintain their varied activities despite the threat of terrorism, the devastation of a natural disaster, and the like. With these infrastructure grants, the government should not pick and choose based on ideology or sexual ethics which institutions should get help. The government’s legitimate interest is only which institution needs recovery help, funding to increase its security measures, or assistance to maintain its structure because the public has deemed it to have historical significance. FEMA used to deny disaster relief to houses of worship, but this unfair treatment was recognized for what it was, and access to assistance was expanded to all religious organizations in January of 2018. When LGBT nondiscrimination is added to federal funding rules, precedent should be respected, and infrastructure-focused grants should be exempt.

School lunch program. Many faith-based private schools participate in the federal school lunch program, making it easier for lower-income families to choose this kind of education. FFA permits these schools, whatever their convictions about human sexuality, to continue to receive this form of federal assistance. The help is, of course, for the poorer families who desire their children to attend a school that shares their religious beliefs.

Religious schools and colleges. No one is required to attend religious educational institutions instead of their secular counterparts; at the same time, religious communities have always had a special interest in forming educational institutions. In the U.S., students and families can select from a wide array of distinctive schools and colleges, choosing the particular one that best embodies their respective convictions. This is often only possible because the government helps to defray the costs. Federal law allows its educational support dollars to follow the students to their chosen institution. Fairness for All maintains this evenhandedness. Religious schools whose convictions about sexuality, marriage, and gender differ from the progressive view would be able to maintain their admissions criteria, curriculum, campus community rules, employment standards, and student-dorm rules, with no threat of loss of accreditation, student access to scholarship help, faculty eligibility for federal research grants, or nonprofit tax exemption.

Adoption and foster care. It is asking a lot of a family or person to persuade them to adopt or foster a child. But with over 100,000 children across the country waiting to be adopted, as many families as possible need to be encouraged to make these hard choices. The more the family trusts and feels comfortable with the agency making the appeal and arrangements, the more likely much-needed decisions to adopt and foster will be made. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) understands this and has been offering for many years specialized training and resources to help agencies become welcoming to LGBT people and couples. Seeing pictures of a family like your own, having agency representatives come to the places where you and your friends gather, hearing words and phrases that reflect your values and sensibilities—accommodations like these can encourage someone to start on the hard path to foster care or adoption. Values compatibility is important for LGBT people, as HRC recognizes—and it is also important for conservative Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others who do not share HRC’s values. Thus, for the sake of children desperately needing new homes, FFA’s rules for adoption and foster care are carefully crafted not to drive out of existence private agencies with conservative moral standards. The FFA adoption and foster care system will not bar conservative faith-based agencies from a license to operate but will instead encourage the development of a wide variety of distinctive private agencies. Federal funds will go to whichever agencies families and individuals choose to work with. States will be required to ensure that no one eligible to become an adoptive or foster parent is excluded from the opportunity to do so.

Funeral homes and cemeteries. There is no reason at all for military cemeteries to exclude gay veterans, Hindu soldiers, or atheist former sailors. And there is no reason at all for private funeral homes and cemeteries to be declared public accommodations and be forbidden to be selective in who and how they serve. Many Jewish funeral parlors only serve members of the Jewish faith. We do not all agree on the meaning of death nor on who the Maker is whom we will be facing upon leaving this life. Fairness for All requires letting a diverse public be served by distinctive private institutions.

Employment. Federal civil rights employment law has always banned baseless religious job discrimination, while at the same time protecting a religious organization’s ability to select staff on the basis of religion. But religion is more than a set of opinions. For most believers, it extends to living according to the expectations of that set of beliefs. FFA adds LGBT nondiscrimination to federal employment law and, correspondingly, strengthens the existing religious exemption so that religious organizations remain free to select only staff committed to their respective religious standards. In its recent Bostock decision the Supreme Court extended LGBT rights in secular places of work, but did not decide what should be done with religious employers. FFA resolves the issue fairly.

Wedding services vendors. With FFA, businesses will be regarded as public accommodations, meant to be open to every member of the public. Yet, there is no good reason why some wedding planners, flower arrangers, cake decorators, and photographers cannot specialize in gay weddings—or traditional weddings. FFA applies the LGBT nondiscrimination rule only to commercial entities with fifteen or more employees, thus protecting diverse services where there is no threat of a monopoly that would exclude some.

RFRA. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed almost unanimously by Congress and signed into law to great acclaim by President Clinton in 1993, gives recourse to the courts when a religious person or organization claims that a federal law or action has substantially burdened their exercise of religion. But the court can rule that the government has a compelling interest to do what it has done and no less burdensome way to achieve that aim, outweighing the religious right. The Equality Act simply says that a religious claim can never be made against it, end of story. FFA preserves RFRA as our nation’s premier statutory protection for religious freedom, with no law or federal action exempt from its scrutiny.

The Law is a Teacher.

Gay people, straight people, evangelicals, Episcopalians, Catholics, Sikhs, “nones”—we all would prefer that the laws would embody our respective values, beliefs, and ethical systems. After all, we are each sure that our particular set of convictions and our own ethical system is right and true, not just for us, but for everyone. But we Americans now deeply disagree on ethics and morality, even as we live together in one single nation. Neither the laws—nor science, social media, TV shows, Scripture—have succeeded in persuading us to agree on a single set of values.

In these circumstances, what is it that the law nonetheless can teach us? Mutual respect and a robust freedom to live by conviction, despite differences—the principle of religious freedom has taught us the possibility, practicality, and worthiness of this kind of “modus vivendi” or pluralism. In extending respect and freedom to each other across our differences in worldview, we do not proclaim that all beliefs are equally true (or equally false)—only that we acknowledge each other as worthy fellow humans whose Maker has given the freedom to seek truth and to embrace error, and that we refuse to concede to government the right and power to dictate what we must all affirm when we are so convinced of different things.

Differences over marriage, human sexuality, and gender identity are not the same as differences over religious doctrines and rituals, but there are important similarities. Here too, there are deep differences that have to do not only with ideas, but also with practices and with the identity or persona we reveal to others. Is the law able to draw boundaries and to foster common ground efforts so that we are able to live together despite these deep differences? That is what the detailed provisions of Fairness for All legislation aim to offer us.

The goal of Fairness for All is to enable us to live with each other as good neighbors across our differences. Good neighbors treat each other with respect and give each other room to maintain distinct ways of life. And good neighbors, caring for each other, are glad to testify to what they each, respectively, have come to acknowledge as the Truth. The legal framework of Fairness for All does not require dropping one’s religious and moral commitments, but rather provides guidelines and guardrails to enable us to live together well despite, and with, our varied worldviews and beliefs.

Everyone is free to live consistently with his or her own convictions about what matters: that is what the Fairness for All law will make possible. It is not what the Equality Act, as it has been introduced, even attempts to achieve.