It is not an easy matter to protect everyone’s legitimate rights when the different people and organizations involved seem to insist on opposite outcomes. Coming to a just equilibrium or balance is made all the harder when accurate information is missing and too many of those involved resort to entirely inadequate simplifications and slogans. It is no help that the freedom to exercise one’s faith out in the world–not just to believe it in your head and not just to worship–has become very contested in the United States, even though it is the first freedom in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .”

The impulse to confine and curtail religious freedom when it gets in the way of other rights–currently: LGBT rights, same-sex marriage, and reproductive rights–has been steadily growing. But it seems suddenly to have become supercharged in the past few weeks, as some groups and commentators–and (very) many in the media–used deliberations over religious freedom bills in Kansas and Arizona as the occasion to try to permanently rebrand religious freedom that goes beyond thought and worship to be just discrimination.

The actual goal of these and other bills seems to be preservation of the status quo in these states. Marriage has not been redefined in these states and their anti-discrimination laws do not reference sexual orientation. Thus, everyone, including religious people and organizations, is free to follow traditional moral values in living their lives and conducting their organizations (and, not happily, free to discriminate with little legal restraint). But that status quo might be upset any day by a judge who declares same-sex marriage to be constitutionally required. Judges are not empowered to craft religious freedom protections to accompany marriage redefinition, so it is up to the legislatures to do so. That means religious freedom bills.

Bigoted? The bills instead were widely pilloried as anti-gay measures, with seemingly little effort being made to actually understand the texts. The Arizona bill was designed to clarify two aspects of the state’s existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act. State RFRAs are modeled on the federal RFRA, which was supported by an extremely broad coalition of religious freedom and civil rights organizations and adopted with virtually no opposition just over 20 years ago.

RFRA laws, federal and state, do not guarantee any particular freedom to religious persons, religious nonprofits, or businesses operated by religious people. They only give religious people and organizations the opportunity to assert a religious freedom claim against a law that they claim imposes a substantial burden on their freedom to exercise their religion. If they make such a claim, they win no automatic right to do whatever they please; instead, a court will weigh that claim against the government’s argument that it has a compelling interest for the law it adopted and that it has no less restrictive way of securing that interest. If so, then the religious claim is denied. But if the government cannot show that it has a sufficiently strong reason to override the religious freedom right, then-and properly so-it cannot suppress that exercise of religion.

Benign? Top experts on RFRA and church-state relations, some of whom support same-sex marriage, wrote a letter to Arizona’s governor as she was deliberating what to do with the RFRA-amending bill. The letter, written by Douglas Laycock, Michael McConnell, Mary Ann Glendon, Carl Esbeck, Thomas Berg, Richard Garnett, and others, pointed out that the bill simply clarified two aspects of Arizona’s existing RFRA. These two aspects have been cast into some question in court battles involving other RFRAs: (1) the religious freedom protections apply in the case of businesses and not only to churches and religious nonprofits; (2) the protections apply not only when it is the government that has challenged a religious person or organization but also when a private citizen sues a religious person or organization, claiming the violation of a government law or regulation.

Redundant? As the letter pointed out, there is very good reason to regard these as merely technical corrections, clarifications of what RFRAs have meant all along, dispelling questions that opponents of RFRAs have tried to raise. Indeed, Michael McConnell, although he signed the letter, has said he does not think the Arizona amendments are even needed: what RFRA requires ought to be clear to the courts even without the bill’s clarifications.

The Kansas bill is a different matter. Rather than a RFRA bill, it was designed to protect religious exercise specifically in the context of a possible judicial decision requiring marriage redefinition in the state. The bill would have made it clear that persons and organizations that, for sincere religious reasons, do not regard same-sex marriages to be legitimate marriages, could not be compelled to help conduct or celebrate such marriages nor to treat them as equivalent to legitimate marriages. Think of marriage counselors, adoption agencies, churches that let wedding parties use their facilities, wedding professionals with a deep religious commitment to traditional marriage as a religious act.

Yet the bill was, at best, poorly crafted–it wrongly proposed that, if every government official in an agency that deals with same-sex marriages has a religious objection, then the government agency may simply refuse to carry out its duties to the same-sex couples. But that cannot be right. Instead, it is incumbent upon the government to fulfill its duties, even at the expense of limiting religious freedom.

Deeply troubling aspects of the storm over these religious freedom proposals include:

• Flagrant misrepresentation by many of the content and effect of the bills.

• Casual dismissal of religious freedom rights.

• Very one-sided and shallow treatment by the media.

• The propensity of some opponents of the bills to assert that since their own religious consciences did not need protection, no one else’s needed protection.

A sign of the times: a Wall Street Journal story (Feb. 28) on the Arizona controversy carried a photograph of opponents of the RFRA amendment bill that shows one protester carrying a sign that urges “Open for business to everyone!” while the sign of the protester right next to him reads “We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators”–the lawmakers who had passed the bill and sent it to the governor.

See also:

Terry Mattingly, “Got news? So what’s RFRA got to do with Arizona?” Get Religion, Feb. 28, 2014.

Inflammatory title notwithstanding: Mollie Hemingway, “Dumb, Uneducated, And Eager to Deceive: Media Coverage of Religious Liberty In A Nutshell,” The Federalist, Feb. 28, 2014.

Conference at the Newseum, Nov. 7, 2013, “Restored or Endangered? The State of Free Exercise of Religion in America.” Three videos of outstanding presentations and discussions.

Baptist Joint Committee, “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: 20 years of protecting our first freedom.”