During my freshman year of high school, I did an (admittedly subpar) research paper on the prevalence of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, or RFRAs, in the United States. My argument was pretty simple; these laws are unnecessary, thinly-veiled excuses to allow discrimination in the name of religion (and primarily in the name of Christianity). This week, when the news of new Trump Administration Labor policies regarding religious beliefs and hiring practices broke, it felt like deja vu.

There was a federal RFRA signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993. The law affirmed that an individual's right to practice their religion may not be restricted by the federal except in cases in which the government needed to further "a compelling government interest," and even then could only by restricted as loosely as possible to still further said interest.

Then the 2010s rolled around, and a ton of states started passing their own RFRAs. The most controversial and highly-covered of these laws was Indiana's, which was signed into law in 2015 by none other than Mike Pence himself. The good news is that disaster of a piece of legislation gave us as a really funny segment on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The bad news is that it was completely awful and blatantly discriminatory. The law pretty much gave religious employers free rein in deciding to refuse to hire groups they didn't agree with. This could have included, for instance, unwed mothers, but primarily targeted LGBT people. Eventually, Indiana acted protections for sexual orientation and gender identity into the law after facing backlash and threats by corporations to halt projects in Indianapolis.

The RFRA craze never fully died out, but it's taken a seat on the back burner in recent years. And with news of new Labor Department policy proposals coming out this week, it's hard not to see it as yet another try to get the discriminatory policies they were thwarted on last time into place. Under current federal law, religious non-profits are exempt from anti-discrimination hiring laws with regards to religion. The new Labor proposal would widen that net of exemptions to include federal contractors, which is patently ridiculous. While religious non-profits can at least argue that their missions are directly related to their religious beliefs and thus best fulfilled by those that subscribe to them, the case that the contractor hired to, say, build a bridge has a vested interest in its employees being religiously homogenous.

But the new proposal is actually even worse than it may originally seem. Since Title VII defines religion as including religious practices and "moral . . . beliefs as to what is right or wrong," the expanded exemptions could affect any who doesn't practice an employer's religion in the precise way they practice it. For instance, if an employer's religious beliefs dictate that women shouldn't work outside of the home, they have a theoretical legal case for a religious exemption against hiring women. Although that consequence is for the moment hypothetical, the danger this law poses to LGBT individuals is not. It's extraordinarily similar to the veiled discrimination of RFRAs.

Calling these measures 'religious freedom,' does a great disservice to the millions of religious individuals who don't want their beliefs used to justify discrimination. Regardless of what the Department of Labor says or what Mike Pence stuttered out in a television interview back in 2015 (seriously, watch that Daily Show clip), these policies are prejudice with the smallest possible attempt to hide it thrown on top. Using religion to try and hide that is manipulative and cruel. The Trump administration is trying to further a legacy of bigotry - we shouldn't call it by any other name, let alone 'freedom.'