Vox Sentences: The debate about Indiana’s religious freedom law, explained

1. RFRA-raff

Angie's List CEO Bill Oesterle speaks about Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act outside the City County Building in March 30, 2015 in Indianapolis. Angie's List has threatened to pull out of a planned expansion to Indiana. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

• Outrage continues to build about Indiana's recently passed religious freedom law, with everyone from the NCAA to Apple CEO Tim Cook to the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly weighing in against it.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Opponents of the law claim it could be used to defend discrimination against LGBT people in court; Cook claims it would let business owners "cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state nondiscrimination law."

  [Washington Post / Tim Cook]

• The counterargument is that in practice, discrimination like that would never fly: it's "highly unlikely to get a court to agree that the [business's] burden trumps the city’s 'compelling interest' to outlaw discrimination."

  [Greensburg Daily News / Boris Ladwig]

• Religious liberty expert and same-sex marriage supporter Douglas Laycock: "There are hardly any cases about discrimination, and nobody has ever won a religious exemption from a discrimination law under a [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] standard."

  [Weekly Standard / Douglas Laycock]

• All the same, Indiana University law professor Robert Katz opposes the law on the grounds that it "gives individuals and businesses the right to file litigation and go to the courts to decide whether or not their religious claims are justified."

  [Robert Katz to Indianapolis Star / Stephanie Wang]

• Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) has indicated he's open to clarifying the law to say it cannot be used to justify discrimination.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Conservatives have argued the law isn't significantly different from the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which passed Congress nearly unanimously in 1993.

  [Weekly Standard / John McCormack]

• Opponents counter that the Indiana law explicitly lets people use religious liberty as a defense in suits involving private individuals and companies, rather than just the government, significantly expanding its scope beyond the federal law or other state ones.

  [ThinkProgress / Judd Legum]

• University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps: "The statute shows every sign of having been carefully designed to put new obstacles in the path of equality; and it has been publicly sold with deceptive claims that it is 'nothing new.'"

  [The Atlantic / Garrett Epps]

• Indiana doesn't have a law banning employment discrimination against LGBT people, but a number of cities and counties (including Indianapolis, South Bend, and Bloomington) do.

  [Human Rights Campaign]

• Indeed, it's still legal in most states to fire someone on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

  [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and German Lopez]

2. Last hours in Lausanne

Secretary of State John Kerry walks back to his hotel with US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Chief of Staff Jon Finer after a lunch following a negotiating session with Iran's Foreign Minister over Iran's nuclear program in Lausanne March 20, 2015. (Brian Snyder/AFP/Getty Images)

• With little over a day to go before the deadline, US and Iranian negotiators still can't agree on key points of a nuclear deal, such as how fast Iran can ramp up uranium enrichment after the ten-year freeze in nuclear development that the deal envisions.

  [CBS News / Margaret Brennan]

• Another sticking point is what happens to the uranium Iran already has. US policymakers insist a deal in which it's shipped out of the country is still possible, but Iranian negotiators sound skeptical.

  [NYT / Michael Gordon and David Sanger]

• Iran is also insisting on an immediate end to sanctions if it halts its nuclear program, which the US is wary of.

  [The Guardian / Julian Borger]

• Overall, a State Dept. spokesperson told the Guardian the odds of a deal were 50/50.

• Bloomberg View's editorial board argues, persuasively, that talks should continue past the deadline; if we're this close to a deal, an arbitrary date passing shouldn't stand in its way.

  [Bloomberg View]

• Daniel Drezner: Obama's anti-ISIS bombings in Iraq and Syria have made Americans more open to the main alternative to an Iran deal: airstrikes.

  [Washington Post / Daniel Drezner]

• It's hard to see how precisely this plays into nuclear talks, but Iran and Saudi Arabia are getting embroiled in the Yemeni civil war, which is presumably weighing on Iran's negotiators.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

3. Depression doesn't make you a homicidal maniac

Co-pilot of Germanwings flight 4U9525 Andreas Lubitz participates in the Frankfurt City Half-Marathon on March 14, 2010 in Frankfurt, Germany. (Getty Images)

• A German prosecutor says that Andreas Lubitz — the Germanwings copilot who is suspected of purposefully downing a flight and killing 150 people — had received psychotherapy for depression and "suicidal tendencies."

  [NYT / Nicholas Kulish and Melissa Eddy]

• I can't believe this needs saying, but depression doesn't make you into a homicidal maniac, and the association of Lubitz's alleged crime with the illness is offensive to those of us who have it.

  [The Guardian / Matt Haig]

• Mental illness, even severe mental illness like schizophrenia, isn't a major cause of violence; psychiatrist Jeffrey Swanson says, "If I could magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, the overall amount of violence in society would go down by about 4 percent."

  [The Atlantic / Julie Beck]

• But the association of mental illness with violence helps create a stigma that prevents people from seeking treatment.

  [Slate / Anne Skomorowsky]

• Dubious mental health linkages are often made after massacres such as this one appears to be; Asperger's syndrome was cited by many as a cause of the Newtown and UC Santa Barbara shootings, when there's absolutely no evidence that Asperger's makes one more prone to violence.

  [Daily Beast / Janelle Dumalaon]

• Pilots in a recent Quora thread suggested that while flying can be emotionally taxing, there's not much that can be done to prevent incidents like Lubitz's, including mental health screenings.

  [Vox / Eleanor Barkhorn]

4. Misc.

• Don't worry, parents; a new study confirms the finding that, more than the amount or quality of time parents spend with their kids, "income and a mother’s educational level are most strongly associated with a child’s future success."

  [Washington Post / Brigid Schulte]

• Republican Ohio governor John Kasich is a fiscal conservative. He's also a devout Christian. And when it comes to welfare programs, the latter is starting to trump the former.

  [New Republic / Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig]

• Criminal justice reformers often talk about helping out "nonviolent offenders." But what if the definition of "violent" is too broad?

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• It Follows is a fantastic horror movie, but it only works because its teen characters appear to have no idea what the internet is.

  [New Republic / Sam Eifling]

• I never knew this: Buzz Aldrin took communion in the lunar lander just before he and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. NASA kept it a secret, fearing a church/state issue.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

5. Verbatim

• "Who would have known that sex would lead to losing money? Obviously, I didn’t."

  [NYT / Slim Thug]

• "If you can get people to give money, that's a much bigger get than getting people to vote for you."

  [Republican National Committee chief of staff Katie Walsh to National Journal / Lucia Graves]

• "Last week, a milestone passed for my family in South Carolina — the 150th anniversary of the last day of slavery. We were the slaveholders."

  [NYT / Edward Ball]

• "Two days later, a student walked down to the lectern after class and informed me that I was wrong about Catholics. He said Baptists were the first Christians and that this is clearly explained in the Bible. His mother told him so. I asked where this was explained in the Bible. He glared at me and said, 'John the Baptist, duh!' and then walked away."

  [Slate / James Krupa]