This is a big deal: The Commission’s recommendations shape rulings on federal employees’ workplace-discrimination claims, and its field offices deal with claims made by employees at private organizations, as well. But the ruling is also a reminder of how complicated—and unresolved—the post-Obergefell legal landscape is. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage at the end of June has set the country up for two new waves of discrimination claims: those made by same-sex couples and LGBT workers, and those made by religious Americans who oppose same-sex marriage. The two may seem distinct or even opposed, but they’re actually intertwined: In certain cases, extending new rights to LBGT workers will necessarily lead to religious-freedom objections, and vice versa.

Right now, it’s impossible to know how these claims will fall out. It’s been less than a month since the ruling, and much of the legal theory on these issues is just that: theory. In Congress, there’s at least some effort to reconcile the two sides. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote on Friday, Democrats are pushing for legislation which would include prohibitions on discrimination in education, housing, and public accommodation, and Republicans may well sign on—if that legislation allows for religious exemptions. No matter what passes, the issues will remain tangled. These will be some of the questions courts and legislatures have to untangle in the wake of Obergefell.

Many Americans may assume the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell will have a direct bearing on cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That’s not quite right, said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University. “The question of how you treat discrimination against gay people is just a different question [than] whether you allow them to marry,” he said. “Allowing them to marry is a question of what the state does. The other question is a question of how you regulate private actors and for what reason.”

A 2014 survey found that roughly 75 percent of Americans believed that federal law prohibits firing or refusing to hire someone on the basis of sexual orientation. Roughly 75 percent of Americans were wrong. Despite repeated attempts to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and similar pieces of legislation in Congress, no federal protection has ever been put in place. As my colleague Joe Pinsker wrote in The Atlantic on Wednesday, the recent EEOC decision is an important first step toward creating these protections at the federal level, but lower courts could dispute the Commission’s interpretation of Title VII. The final interpretation of this statute would have to come from the Supreme Court, particularly if lower courts challenge the Commission’s decision.

Which leaves an open question: What about private employers who claim to have a religious objection to having gay employees? Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, was skeptical that these kinds of claims could make it very far in court—or that they’d even come up that often. “When you say, I can’t have any gay person working in my [business], and it’s against my religion, judges are going to be skeptical that that’s a religious belief,” he said. “Non-discrimination laws serve a compelling interest.”

For now, the bigger issue is the ambiguity. In the absence of explicit federal protections—and in many places, state protections—someone who believed he or she was being discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation would be totally dependent on the interpretation of the courts.

Spousal Benefits

Where things get trickier, though, is with spousal benefits. To help explain why, a bit of background: Often, when people sue for religious exemptions to certain laws, they do it under the auspices of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. This June, before the same-sex-marriage ruling, the ACLU ran an op-ed in The Washington Post declaring that it could no longer support the federal version of RFRA. The reason it cited was the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby, in which the Court ruled that most private businesses could legitimately claim a religious objection to covering certain kinds of birth control in their employees’ health-insurance plans, something that’s now required by the Affordable Care act. “The RFRA wasn’t meant to force employees to pay a price for their employer’s faith,” the op-ed’s author, Louise Melling, wrote. “Efforts of this nature will likely only increase should the Supreme Court rule—as is expected—that same-sex couples have the freedom to marry.”

“I do anticipate the kinds of claims,” said Douglas NeJaime, a law professor at UCLA. “The kind of claim that you saw in Hobby Lobby—you could see similar kinds of claims in the same-sex marriage context: The employer objects to providing benefits to the same-sex spouse, claiming that it makes the employer complicit in the sinful conduct it objects to.”

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