WASHINGTON In the coming days, the Republican-controlled Michigan Senate is expected to vote on a controversial religious freedom measure.

Critics have dubbed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) a license to discriminate. They say the measure would open the door to discrimination, claiming that it would, for example, permit a medical professional who objects to homosexuality for religious reasons to refuse treatment to a gay patient.

The bills proponents argue that such scenarios are hypothetical scare tactics. After all, they say, the bill was modeled after an existing federal law that has been on the books for more than 20 years.

Michigan is the latest in a slew of states to propose RFRA legislation. In February, amidst rancorous debate and threats of corporate boycotts, Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a similar measure, warning that the bill is broadly worded and can result in unintended and negative consequences. (The bill was actually an amendment to a previous RFRA law the state passed.)

Two months later, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, also a Republican, signed a similar bill into law. Kansas and Kentucky passed their own RFRA laws last year. In all, 19 states have RFRA laws on the books. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 10 states have contemplated similar legislation over the past two years.

This is definitely something that is starting to get some steam, said Michigan Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton, a Democrat. When a state like Michigan passes something like this, it opens the door in terms of the Midwestern bloc of Great Lakes states.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law. Introduced by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Orin B. Hatch, R-Utah, the bill states that the federal government shall not substantially burden a persons exercise of religion. The legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan support as well as the endorsement of the ACLU, which has used RFRA in lawsuits over the years.

At the time, the law was intended to bypass a Supreme Court ruling, Employment Division Oregon v. Smith, which held that the state of Oregon was free to include religiously inspired peyote use within the reach of its general criminal prohibition for use of that drug, and thus permitted the State to deny unemployment benefits to persons dismissed from their jobs because of such religiously inspired use.

Peyote is used in some American Indian religious rites. The ruling meant that religious practices were not protected from government regulation, according to Doug Laycock, a University of Virginia legal scholar who wrote a letter to the Michigan legislature supporting the RFRA bill.

In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the federal RFRA, ruling that the law did not apply to states. Originally, RFRA did apply to both federal government and the states, Laycock said. By 2000, nine states had passed their own RFRA laws, largely in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

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Religious freedom or a license to discriminate?