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In early February, the Nation published a leaked draft of an executive order titled Establishing a Government Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom. The language is, for lack of a more damning adjective, chilling to any proponent of the Constitution. The order aims to eradicate federal protections for LGBT Americans and their familiesand undermine reproductive rightsunder the guise of religious freedom.

The order announces a lofty intention: protecting Americans from being coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience. It then sets out, over four dense pages, its dubious means of doing so: authorizing those who hold extreme and discriminatory views to act on them, while guarding against a violation of conscience by licensing a violation of others fundamental rights.

Upon review, it rapidly becomes clear that Trump cant expect the order to survive judicial review intact. He tips his hand by instructing agencies to issue regulations to implement provisions as legally feasible. The purpose of the order is to normalize and even privilege a set of positions and viewpoints, not to legalize all of them.

The order gives Americans total religious freedom in all activities of life. Lest the sweeping nature of all activities of life be limited by interpretation (or by a deficit of imagination), Trumps draft order suggests specific scenarios: Americans do not forfeit their religious freedom when providing social services, education, or healthcare, earning a living, seeking a job, or employing othersor when interacting with government at any level. Never mind that 61 percent of Americans oppose allowing belief-based service refusals.

From a Michigan pediatrician to a Colorado baker, service providers and business owners who have objected to accommodating same-sex couples would have an affirmative right to discriminate. While it is not illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodation in 29 statesthe pediatrician in Michigan faced no legal consequence, for examplethere is a vast difference between failing to make discrimination illegal and explicitly protecting discrimination in lawfederally. While LGBT Americans may be the most obvious targets, unwed parents and their children, for example, could also be discriminated against with impunity under the proposed language.

Unsatisfied by having spelled out the right to refuse to provide social services, Trump dedicates a subsection to making it more difficult for those on the wrong side of the far rights religious beliefs to have a family and care for their children. Adoption agencies and support services would be explicitly granted the right to refuse adoptive parents and families based on belief. This is, of course, redundanthes already bestowed that right. The point of the subsection is political and social.

This subsection is a prcis of the failed Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014, the first of several such measures too extreme for Congress to pass that Trump incorporates to establish his far-right bona fides. It is a particularly short-sighted gesture. More than 420,000 children are in the foster care system. Same-sex couples are six times more likely than straight couples to foster children; we are four times more likely to adopt. But if Trumps executive order were implemented, agencies and service providers could deny not only opportunities to foster and adopt but also critical services and benefits to any family whose structure is inconsistent with their religious beliefs. Trumps text then turns to ensuring the right of corporations to discriminate by codifying Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., in which the Supreme Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, which limits government infringement on religious exercise, protects some closely held corporations as well as individuals. Passed in response to clashes between government agencies and Native American religious beliefs, RFRAand offshoot state legislationhas become a favorite vehicle for justifying discrimination in an ever-widening array of settings.

Trump would also resurrect the Russell Amendment, which would have allowed employers to refuse to hireas well as fireindividuals who clashed with the employers religious belief even simply by being gay. He elsewhere mandates federal employers, contractors, and grantees to proactively protect employees prerogative to, in effect, preach prejudice and discriminate openly. Conversely, Trump would kill the Johnson Amendment. On the campaign trail and again at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump promised religious conservatives that he would do away with this 1954 tax provision barring some tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from endorsing political candidates. Trump cant actually repeal legislation, but he canand here doestell the IRS not to enforce it. The result is the same.

There are more than 1,300 megachurchesthat is, churches with more than 2,000 regular attendeesin the United States. Their total annual income tops $8.5 billion. The Second Baptist Church of Houston alone has 24,000 members and an budget of $53 million. If Trump signed this order, these organizations would change the electoral landscape overnight, especially at the state level.

And Trump does more than license churches to enter the political arena: He grants special protections to organizations like churches and to federal employees who act consistent with any of four enumerated, extreme viewpoints: Marriage is between one man and one woman, sex is for such marriages only, gender is immutable and defined at or before birth, and life begins at conception. Organizations advocating opposite views, by the way, could still be penalized for doing so. But theres limited cause to worry that this provision will survive judicial scrutiny. The first three beliefs come from a Mississippi religious freedom bill that a federal district court ruled unconstitutional. Finally, although Trump had promised not to rescind Obamas executive order creating workplace protections for LGBT employees, in two devastating bullets Trump instructs agencies to reverse all current agency rulings, guidance, and regulations inconsistent with the orderdeclaring that the new document supersedes any previous, related executive orders.

In sum, the order would erase almost all existing federal efforts to affirm LGBT rights, which are still in a nascent and unprotected state as neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has codified protections. The Obama administration established rights through executive orders and administrative maneuvers. For example, agencies interpreted Title VII, which forbids sex discrimination in employment, to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation. These are now vulnerable. Only independent agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, would continue to honor these measures if the order were signed.

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