In the months before the 2016 presidential election, many advocates of gay rights and many advocates of religious liberty were convinced that an undesirable election result could present an existential threat to their ways of life. And in the days following election night, many activists for gay rights feared that their victories of the last decade might be wiped away with a stroke of the presidential pen.
But the election of Donald Trump is very unlikely to result in a dramatic change in the status of gay Americansâ??—â??or in a dramatic victory for the religious-liberty caucus, despite the outsized influence of the Supreme Court. The same would have been true if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency. The truth is that the argument over gay rights and religious liberty was never going to be settled in a single election. To see why, consider two bills that went before the last Congress.
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