Our Mission

Fairness for All proceeds from a simple idea: faith and sexuality need not be at odds. The best way to protect religion is to protect the LGBT community from discrimination. And the best way to secure nondiscrimination protections is to make sure that religion is not inadvertently harmed.

Fairness for All is not a conservative or liberal idea, and it is not a religious or secular concept. Many people of faith believe that all persons, gay or straight, should have a place to live and the ability to support themselves and their families. And many LGBT advocates have no desire to harm religion or religious communities. Common ground lawmaking is the best way to accomplish these goals.

Fairness for All laws—those combining robust religious liberty protections with nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community—provide the strongest, most stable response to the needs of faith communities and religious individuals at a time of great social change.

When religious liberty and LGBT interests collide, instead of incivility and driving toward a winner-take-all result, we should embrace civility, protection of core rights for all, and reasonable compromise. The goal should be pluralism rather than domination by either side. That must be our objective. 

Reaching common ground solutions is the way forward. It is premised on the American ideal that in a diverse society, there should be space for everyone to live and act according to what’s most important to them. It seeks to preserve religious freedom while also securing essential rights for others—including LGBT Americans. It is an approach to living peacefully despite the fundamental differences that will always exist in our society.

The Fairness for All Initiative was born out of the struggle between two groups with newly competing interests. Rather than trying to oust one group from the public square, those behind the Fairness for All Initiative took the more difficult task of finding common ground where mutually beneficial solutions could be reached. The team at Fairness for All has taken on this vigorous task through research-driven, in-depth, scholarly work that takes account of the practical needs of the religious and LGBT communities.

Fairness for All truly came into force in 2015 during the formative process of the Utah Compromise, an innovative piece of legislation that protected both LGBT rights and religious freedom and has produced social stability.