This is the first of what I think will be three diaries that directly resulted from my experience at NN 14. Religious exemptions was identified as one of the five major post-marriage issues for the LGBT community at the LGBT Caucus, and it seemed to be the one on which I could do the most good. My mission for the foreseeable future is going to be finding every law that contains an exemption that goes beyond the one preserved by Executive Order 11478, the Bush formula
that allows religiously affiliated contractors to favor employees of a certain religion in making hiring decisions. The history of that exemption, and of the effort to navigate a passage between the shoals of the First and the Fourteenth Amendments, as a necessary background for this effort, follows.↧