@susanquinn has brought to our attention the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of the Department of Health and Human Services, and specifically this division’s director. On the one hand I applaud the concept that the religious freedom of healthcare providers should be aggressively defended, but on the other hand I cannot but see this as a bad omen.

You see, this is an admission that religious people are the objects of discrimination by our own government, by businesses, and by other groups of people. But it is also yet another declaration both that our government needs to protect entire groups of people from other groups of people, and that the federal government is the sole arbiter of which groups get protecting from whom, from what, and where those protections extend.