The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (specifically Title VII) is the Holy Grail of discrimination protections in the United States. It protects against discrimination in places of public accommodation (airports, restaurants) for race, color, sex, religion and national origin. You will notice however those protections do not include provisions for LGBT individuals. An internal EEOC ruling followed by an Article III decision in 2015 - 2016 finally interpreted "sex" to include LGBT discrimination. However, a variety of state laws and local ordinances protected LGBT individuals from discrimination in the workplace. The Great State of Minnesota (yes, I'm from there), became the first state in the nation to include protections for both sexual orientation and gender identity in their Human Rights Act in 1993. (Florida has yet to protect either).

One cannot read a news article today without seeing a story about a court ruling or new statute regarding protection of LGBT individuals, or conversely, the freedom to practice religion and the intersection of those two views. For example, recent state and Supreme Court cases have found that private bakeries are not required to provide services for same-sex weddings.

What is the appropriate balance between individual liberties and the law? One person's liberty is another person's oppression. Freedom and equality despite arguably being our two most important values as a nation, are in fact contradictory forces. How can you be free and equal concurrently? Should for-profit business owners have the right on religious grounds to perform certain services to LGBT individuals, provide contraceptives to employees pursuant to the ACA (Obamacare), and so on and so forth?