I guess I'm the inevitable poster referred to in the OP.
The Michigan bill is largely identical to the federal
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, enacted in 1993 by a unanimous vote of the (Democrat-controlled) House and a vote of 97-3 in the (Democrat-controlled) Senate, and signed into law by Bill Clinton. It is also similar to the state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts enacted by 19 other states (by
Wikipedia's count) in the years since 1997 (and most
before 2005), when the
Supreme Court ruled that the federal Act could not apply to state laws. Nevertheless, the federal Act has been applied by the Supreme Court with respect to federal laws and regulations (remember
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby?), so it's unlikely that a federal constitutional challenge to the state laws would succeed.
The way these laws typically work is as follows: the law provides an exemption to a person from other law if such other law substantially burdens the person's religious exercise, unless the government can prove that enforcing the other law serves a compelling government interest and that such enforcement is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling government interest. In other words, courts are called upon to balance the interests of the government against the interests of private persons on a case-by-case basis. So,
contra the poster above, none of these laws would permit terrorism--the government clearly has an interest in protecting life and property against attacks, and prohibitions on such attacks are undoubtedly the least restrictive means of furthering the government's compelling interest in preventing them. (For those interested in further reading on how the federal law operates, see the series of posts by UCLA law professor
Eugene Volokh here.)
There are a number of problems with framing these laws as anti-gay or as providing a "license to discriminate." First, the laws are far too broad to permit such pigeonholing. They apply to government actions across the board, not merely those that require non-discrimination against gays. Maybe providing religious exemptions from otherwise generally applicable laws is a good idea, or maybe it's a bad idea, but that decision should be made by considering the law as a whole, not one (merely possible, as will be seen) application of the law. (Here are
a few ways in which the Texas RFRA has been applied over the years, for instance.) Second, it's not even clear that these laws provide private parties with a defense against private plaintiffs suing to enforce civil rights legislation. For example, New Mexico has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act much like the one passed by the Michigan House. Yet, the
New Mexico Supreme Court held that the NM RFRA did not apply in a suit between a lesbian couple and a photographer who refused to photograph the couple's commitment ceremony, because the NM RFRA applied only to suits in which the government was a party.
