While the United States is not without problems of religious discrimination, these problems tend to be the exceptions and not the rule. In any case, there is no serious persecution of American Christians, and certainly no one in living memory has been killed for being Catholic in America.

Nevertheless, the implication is that equality for all citizens is an infringement not only of their religious freedom but constitutes an attack on religious freedom generally. The further implication is that persecution and martyrdom are at hand.

Indeed, this plays into a broad, hyperbolic Christian Right narrative that advances a dark vision of tyranny in America - which the faithful must prepare to resist.

Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, who heads the USCCB Committee on Religious Liberty (which organizes Fortnight for Freedom), denied in a speech in November 2014 that he and his fellow bishops are right-wing culture warriors bent on imposing their agenda on everyone else. But he also essentially acknowledged that they want to do just that by, among other things, blocking access to legal and otherwise constitutionally protected contraception and abortion care wherever they can.

To Lori and other Christian Right leaders, religious freedom is synonymous with opposition to abortion and marriage equality. Lori also said the bishops are "concerned" for people who run businesses and for government officials "who do not want to become implicated in supporting same sex `marriages.'"

Lori and his colleagues want to have it both ways: to be both for and against freedom. So we get increasingly Orwellian definitions (or redefinitions) of religious freedom used to turn policy differences into histrionics.

A classic of the form, highlighted on the Fortnight for Freedom web page, was an address given April 26, 2015 by Thomas Farr, a leading Catholic neoconservative who heads the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University. His talk was titled "ISIS and Indiana: The Global Crisis of Religious Liberty and Catholic Responsibility."

Note Farr's insinuation that the Middle Eastern Islamic terror group ISIS has some bearing on the recent battle over LGBTQ discrimination in the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  In the speech itself, Farr suggests that religious liberty is in danger of being "lost in America."

His claim is of a piece with a favorite rhetorical device of the Christian Right.  There are indeed serious religious freedom concerns in the world, and people are sometimes killed or otherwise persecuted for their faith. But these things are not happening to Christians in America. Not even close.

Dire situations elsewhere are being used to suggest a trend that does not exist in the U.S., and thereby to justify a domestic public policy agenda that seeks dramatic exemptions from civil rights laws intended to protect LGBTQ people.

Here then are two good responses to the claims we are likely to hear during the Fortnight for Freedom:

First, the advance of civil rights for LGBTQ people is not to be conflated with religious persecution and martyrdom. Second, no one gets to choose which laws they are going to obey. Not even conservative Christians.

    Crossposted from LGBTQ Nation