Last, week, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence stirred up controversy when he signed a “religious freedom” bill into law.  The law has businesses and civil rights groups up in arms and threatening — or in some cases pledging — to boycott the state.  Critics assert the law could be used by individuals and businesses to discriminate on the basis of religion — particularly against the LGBT community of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

Pence has been trying to use the “nothing to see here” and “everybody’s doing it” defenses to the new law, which is why he’s loath to get into the law’s details and admit that the statute he signed is not just like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and not just like most other states’ RFRAs.

At the Atlantic, Garret Epps has a good simple description of how the Indiana statute differs from most precedents:

[T]he Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government.

So Indiana is trying to create a genuinely plenary zone of sanctioned discrimination, including every kind of entity and protecting discriminators from legal action from any direction. The first point carries it beyond SCOTUS interpretation of the federal RFRA in the Hobby Lobby case as covering “closely held” corporations, but not all for-profits. And the second means Indiana isn’t just protecting religious folk against the all-powerful government, but against the very targets of their discrimination.