When the Supreme Court made same sex marriage legal in 2015, many people thought the conflicts over gay rights were over.
LGBT people are represented widely in movies and television shows and a few even hold political office.
The culture wars are over, right? Not exactly.
In 28 states, it's perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay.
And some religious people believe they are being persecuted for their beliefs.
The two sides haven't found a way to work together.
And the fight is getting a lot nastier.
"The Supreme Court can do many things, but the Supreme Court cannot get Jesus Christ back into the grave.
" That's all I'm asking, is a safe place for me and people like me to go to the bathroom.
You've probably heard about recent religious freedom bills, like laws in North Carolina and Mississippi and the bill that got vetoed at the last minute in Georgia.
New legislation is creating protections for people, mostly Christians, who have religious objections to homosexuality, same sex marriage, and transgender identity.
At the heart of these bills are tough questions about rights and discrimination.
Should a baker have to bake a cake for a gay couple if he believes homosexuality is a sin? Here's what's showing up in these laws.
Some bills concern bathrooms.
This is what we saw recently in North Carolina where the legislature is requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex at birth.
But this is very difficult to enforce.
The government can't really expect teachers or state employees to check peoples genitals to make sure they're using the right restroom There really isn't any way for anybody to operationalize this rule.
This is just literally a sop to people who are afraid of something that they haven't really seen or ever engaged.
Another protects clerks and judges who don't want to marry gay couples at court houses or sign their marriage licenses.
Remember Kim Davis? She was the Kentucky clerk who refused to sign her name on gay marriage licenses and was jailed for refusing to do so.
Finally, some for-profit business owners don't want to provide services to same-sex marriage ceremonies.
This includes photographers, bakers, florists, DJs and more.
But, in many places, these claims are somewhat ironic.
In most states, businesses can already choose no to serve LGBT people.
I don't believe it's morally decent to say to two gay guys who come in for a cake, "Ok, you need to go down the street to this other place.
" As you might imagine, LGBT advocates want to change that.
They want to make it explicitly illegal in all 50 states for employers to fire people or landlords to refuse to rent houses or apartments to people or businesses to refuse to serve people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
So far, there hasn't been much dealmaking with religious conservatives.
Utah is the only state that's passed a so called "Compromise Bill" which combined LGBT protections, with exemptions for religious groups.
"I would be very disappointed if if I had a bill for religious freedom that did not include anti-discrimination.
" So in the United States, we're facing a new set of questions about what rights mean and about what discrimination means.
The question is how you put those two ideas in conversation with one another.
Where one person's rights stop and another person's rights begin.
What's the difference between discrimination and protection?.
Source: Youtube
