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Nasir and Matt talk about the Indiana'sReligious Freedom Restoration Act and how a pizza place was the first to adopt the new law. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our podcast where we cover business in the news and add our legal twist. My name is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub. NASIR: And this story was built for us as if they put it together. Matt’s been messaging me all week, like, “We have to cover this!” because it has to do with pizza and Yelp, right? It’s a nice combination, but there’s other things too, right? GoFundMe. MATT: Yeah, there’s a lot of things. I mean, even starting from the beginning. You know, I’m from Indiana. NASIR: There you go. MATT: Yeah, and we just talked about last week the people that are taking, like, the Taylor Swift and the Ted Cruz URLs. NASIR: Oh, that’s true. MATT: It’s kind of the same thing. Someone basically created a fake website for this company. If you’re listening to this, you obviously know how technology works and you’ve heard about this story that’s been going around. NASIR: “You know how technology works”? Yeah. MATT: Well, I figure anyone who listens to a podcast would definitely have heard this story over the last couple of weeks at some point. NASIR: Well, I don’t know. I could picture, like, a Unabomber-type person in the middle of nowhere listening to our podcast and our podcast only. So, this is where they get the news, you know? MATT: So, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which isn’t new in general but at least new to, I guess, this version is new to Indiana. You did a good job explaining the federal. NASIR: Yeah. So, this is not a new law to the country. Like you said, it’s a new law to the state of Indiana. I think there’s actually 18 or 19 other states that have almost the exact same law and this was actually modelled after a federal law back in the 90s – you know, during the Bill Clinton presidency. And so, it is kind of strange from a legal perspective to see the reaction and I think even the governor felt the same way. He felt taken back of the reaction that he’s received because what is a pop news story right now going on about this law is that people are using this law or interpreting this law or this law was even passed to discriminate against homosexuals or based upon sexual orientation and the actual language itself has nothing to do with that. And so, then the question is, “What were the intentions behind this law?” Was it to discriminate? MATT: Yeah. I mean, you’re exactly right in that and there’s nothing in there. It’s all about the exercise of religion so it’s reading the actual bill itself reminds me of the constitutional law class where you had to do all these tests on whether the burdens outweigh the benefits, things like that. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: That’s essentially how this is worded. If you’re really interested, you can read the actual bill itself but it’s just a test saying that the state or local government can’t substantially burden a person’s right to exercise a religion unless it’s blah blah blah. I don’t need to get into the whole thing but it’s nothing to do with sexuality at all. NASIR: Yeah, it restates what the law is already regarding the application of religious freedoms. And so, what’s interesting, if I asked one of these, you know, people that are protesting against this law, if I asked them, “Okay, before this law was passed, could an Indiana business owner discriminate against a homosexual?” what do you think their answer would be? MATT: No? NASIR: Of course, it would be “no” but the answer is that they can and they can before the law and the can after. Now, I’m sure this is going to be a challenge but the reality is that there is no federal protection for sexual orientation but there is state protection on a state-by-state level – California is one of them amongst many others and I think the trend is such that it’ll start extending to that. Even in Indiana,