By now you’ve heard plenty about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.[1] Critics claim the ruling is “an attack on women”[2] that blocks their access to birth control[3] and threatens other forms of health care.[4] They also say the Court has given corporations unprecedented “human rights”[5] and enabled employers to impose religious strictures on workers.[6] Supporters respond that the ruling still requires health insurers to cover most types of birth control,[7] and if an affected worker wants an uncovered type then she need only purchase it herself.[8] Besides, supporters say, if a worker wants coverage for a specific form of birth control, she just has to find an employer with a compatible religious view.[9]

Remarkably, every one of those claims is wrong. Under the ruling, Hobby Lobby’s workers should still have full coverage for all legal forms of birth control. Workers who want such coverage shouldn’t have to “job shop” for employers with similar religious views. And the “parade of horribles” that supposedly ensues from the decision—companies imposing religious views on workers, women losing access to health care, corporations having more First Amendment rights than individuals—is a parade of fictions.

The Hobby Lobby case resulted from requirements for employee health care plans that the Obama administration issued in 2012.[10] Companies must satisfy those requirements in order to meet the “employer mandate” created by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly called “Obamacare”). One requirement is that plans must cover all 20 forms of legal birth control at no out-of-pocket cost to workers. 

Hobby Lobby and two other companies—a Mennonite carpentry shop and a Christian bookstore chain—objected to having to pay for coverage of four specific types of birth control: two drugs and two medical devices that prevent already-fertilized eggs from developing in the womb. According to the companies, paying for those medical goods would violate religious convictions explicitly written into the companies’ organizing documents, including a stated belief in the sanctity of human life.[11]

The companies made their objection under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a liberal law whose co-sponsors included Barney Frank, Bernie Sanders, and Nancy Pelosi (as well as Roscoe Bartlett).[12] RFRA requires, in part, that if some government policy conflicts with a person’s religious practice and an alternative policy would achieve the same goal with less conflict, then government should only require the alternative for the objecting person of faith. If there is no reasonable alternative, then (assuming it is otherwise legal) the original policy stands regardless of religious objection.

Some critics of the Hobby Lobby decision argue that RFRA applies only to individuals, not businesses. Those critics misunderstand legislative language. Under a 1947 law, legislative use of the unqualified term “person” is understood to refer to both individuals and groups of people, including “corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies.”[13] It’s unlikely RFRA’s sponsors used that language haphazardly, as they surely were aware of Kosher butcher shops, Christian bookstores, Halal grocery stores and other businesses that incorporate religious practice into their operations.

Back in 2012, soon after the Obama administration announced its employer mandate requirements, religious organizations protested that they were being forced to pay for types of birth control that their creeds forbid. The White House, wanting to avoid controversy during President Obama’s reelection campaign, offered an “accommodation”: Religious institutions (e.g., churches) would be exempt from the requirement. Other religious organizations (e.g., religious orders and universities) would not have to pay for birth control they found objectionable, but their insurers or health care administrators would nonetheless have to cover all legal forms of birth control at no out-of-pocket cost to employees.[14] The Obama administration claims that insurers and administrators would do this willingly because they would suffer no net expense: birth control is much cheaper than pregnancy.[15]

The second part of this accommodation makes the Court’s reasoning in Hobby Lobby straightforward: There is (at least) one alternative policy that would satisfy the government’s goal of full coverage for all legal forms of birth control. That alternative reduces conflict with people’s religious practice. Hence, under RFRA, government should employ the less-conflicting alternative when dealing with religious objectors.

This ruling is not only correct as a matter of law, but it is also remarkably centrist and pragmatic. It protects religious diversity while, at the same time, approves the Obama administration policy of expanding coverage of all legal forms of birth control. The Obama administration need only broaden the language in its accommodation to secure that coverage. As the Court notes of its ruling, “the effect … on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved in these cases would be precisely zero.”[16]

The degree to which the news media and commentators have misunderstood and misconstrued the Hobby Lobby decision is remarkable, demonstrating the poor state of today’s journalism and political commentary. But one point, raised by critics of the decision, does have merit: employers, they say, should not be involved in people’s health care. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has promoted that involvement for decades, going back to World War II labor law and 1950s tax law.[17] In 2010, Congress and the Obama administration expanded that involvement with the employer mandate. It’s just one more example of the problems that result from government’s ever-growing intrusion into people’s lives.[18]

Thomas A. Firey is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a Washington County native.