This is a really dangerous idea, that religious employees of businesses can or should refuse to serve customers on the basis of personal religious beliefs. As a gay man, this is a critical issue for me, because a large minority of the United States population has religious issues with my existence.

Refusing medical care and other service on religious grounds has frightening consequences. For example, the lawyer in Texas who proposed the law that allowed individual people to sue abortion providers has a new bright idea.

He's pushing for a similar law to prevent state agencies and health insurance companies from paying for AIDS prevention drugs called PrEP.

He claims taking those drugs encourages "homosexual behavior" and that Christians should not have to pay for that on religious freedom grounds.

The law is expected to pass the House in the next Texas legislative session. Its prospects in the Senate are unclear, but it very well could pass. Given the Supreme Court's history on religious freedom cases recently, nobody is sanguine about the judicial branch striking the law down.

I just wrote about an order of nuns in Peoria Illinois who run a hospital chain with 25,000 employees. In defiance of Title 7 civil rights law, they've just changed the health care coverage they offer to their employees, the vast majority of whom are not Catholic.

Under the new policy, opposite sex couples can have fertility treatment covered by their insurance, but same-sex couples can't.

The nuns are making essentially the same argument as that Walmart employee and that lawyer in Texas. "Our religious freedom means we have the right to dictate your behavior on religious grounds."

At least Walmart gets around it by saying they will serve all customers even if not every Walmart employee will.

But the other cases illustrate a frightening future America in which freedom is strangled for large groups of people based on religious objections – in the name of Liberty.

We need to start understanding more clearly the freedom does not mean taking away other people's basic liberties.