At one point, Hemingway opined that the nation is grappling with a conflict between sexual liberty and religious liberty. Her point seemed to be that LGBT rights activists and their allies in the media have decided that sexual liberty is more important than religious liberty, and thus the latter must yield.

It made a nice argument for radio, but it's too glib to stand up to rigorous analysis. Same-sex couples aren't seeking the right to have sex; consenting adults have had that right for a long time. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. (Such laws, which existed in 14 states, weren't being enforced in most of them.)

The current cultural battle isn't about who an adult chooses to sleep with. It is about marriage. And because marriage is - or ought to be - serious business, people are smart enough to know what's at stake. That's why they took to the streets in Indiana. That's why there was such a blowback to a law that used religious liberty as a stalking horse for discrimination. That's why we're still feeling the reverberations.

Same-sex couples are seeking - and increasingly winning - the rights that opposite-sex couples have taken for granted for centuries: the right to make a legal and public declaration of love and support; the right to have a legal say in each other's lives and the power to make decisions for one another if one partner becomes incapacitated; the right to own property jointly; the right to inherit property and goods if one partner dies; the right to raise children, etc.

Those are the tangible benefits of marriage. The intangible benefits are more difficult to describe but can be perhaps best summed up in the daily comfort and strength one receives from the knowledge that there is someone who cares for you in a way no other does.

Both the tangible and intangible benefits are powerful. But the state of Indiana didn't choose to facilitate their extension to same-sex couples. Instead, it chose to offer protections to bakers who don't want to make cakes for certain people.

We heard it said a lot last week that Indiana's law wasn't really about discrimination against gay people. Is that so? Religious Right groups seemed to think that it was. And when Gov. Mike Pence signed the law, he was flanked by several beaming anti-LGBT activists who seemed to have reason to believe they had scored a political victory.

The fact is, the Indiana bill was never about defending a Sikh who wanted to wear a turban with his police uniform or protecting Amish-owned shops from burdensome red tape. If real religious liberty violations had been occurring in Indiana, they would have been addressed a long time ago. That didn't happen. In Indiana, it became imperative to pass a "religious freedom" law only after same-sex marriage became legal there in October of 2014.

The backlash put a stop to it this time, but that doesn't mean we've seen the last of this issue. Far from it. Many observers believe the Supreme Court may be on the verge of extending same-sex marriage nationwide. Religious Right groups are determined to formulate a contingency plan. Right now, that plan takes the form of dressing up shabby forms of discrimination in the noble garment of religious liberty.

That will be the Religious Right's strategy for the foreseeable future. Despite the turn of events in Indiana, we haven't seen the last of it.