LAUSR

ABSTRACT Progressive actors are losing the battle to protect LGBT and reproductive rights from conservative claims of a right to religious discrimination. Increasingly, we are witnessing legal challenges premised on the ground that religious actors’ First Amendment rights and women’s and LGBT rights to equal protection and public accommodation are in conflict. This article contextualizes so-called “competing rights” claims within a longer political and legal history. We utilize a discursive institutionalist framework to assess the strategies used both by conservative political actors promoting a “competing rights” agenda and by LGBT activists focused on narrative change and marriage equality. Finding the limited strategy adopted by marriage equality activists cannot effectively withstand the legal challenge mounted by those claiming “competing rights,” we propose a new strategy for resistance premised on a strict interpretation of church/state separation and suggest a strategy for preserving and expanding public accommodation law through the creation of intersectional coalitions.