This legal explainer explores how religious exemption measures threaten more than just LGBTQ and reproductive health, and can limit or significantly undermine workers’ rights, public health, environmental welfare, emergency response, religious pluralism, and other crucial interests.

This report outlines the ways in which a guidance document issued by the Trump-era Attorney General interprets and expands religious liberty laws in a way that elevates the right to religious exemptions over other legal and constitutional rights. The guidance has been used to limit access to reproductive health care and threatens to limit enforcement of various health, employment, and anti-discrimination protections.

Ashe McGovern, Legislative and Policy Director of Columbia Law School’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project testified before the New York City Council Committee on Women’s Issues on a bill that would require several city agencies to undergo training on “implicit bias, discrimination, cultural competency and structural inequity, including with respect to gender, race and sexual orientation.”