Tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court finally takes up a case that has been headed toward their courtroom since the 2010 passage of ObamaCare. Two private companies are challenging the Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate that requires all companies to pay for a range of services including contraception and abortion-inducing drugs that violate the religious beliefs of their owners. The two companies, the Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby craft store chain and Pennsylvania’s Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation are seeking to defend the First Amendment rights to exercise of religion against the government’s attempt to impose its beliefs and policies on all employers by threatening to ruin them with fines and penalties if they dare to refuse to obey the mandate.

But according to the administration and its liberal cheerleaders in the media, the stakes involved in this case involve nothing less than the future of women’s rights as well as those of gays. As the lead of a New York Times news story that would have been better placed on their opinion page read, this is a “case that pits religious liberty against women’s rights.” That frame of reference dovetailed nicely with a Times editorial that claimed Hobby Lobby and its supporters were “crying wolf about religious liberty” that would allow business owners to impose their beliefs on their helpless employees. Even worse, they claim it will gut health care and deny basic services to many Americans.

This is nothing less than a scare campaign aimed at intimidating the conservative members of the high court—or perhaps just Chief Justice John Roberts, whose worries about exposing his institution to political criticism allowed ObamaCare to survive a justified challenge to its constitutionality in 2012—to back away from a rigorous interpretation of the law that would obligate them to strike down the mandate. Far from setting off legal chaos that will undermine the foundation of human rights in this country, should Hobby Lobby and its fellow plaintiffs win, the result would be a reaffirmation of individual liberty and the basic protections afforded all Americans by the Constitution.

As I have noted previously, you don’t have to agree with the owners of Hobby Lobby or other persons of faith about abortion or contraception in order to understand that a defeat for them would endanger everyone’s rights. If their religious liberty is considered less important than the government’s desire to create a universal mandate for employers to pay for such services, then there is no limit to what the government can demand and no room for faith in our public square anymore. In this case the plaintiffs are merely asking the courts to remember that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) set a standard by which government would be forced to prove that they were not imposing a substantial burden on the free exercise of faith by demanding that believers bow to their dictates. This is clearly not the case with ObamaCare, since its contraception mandate forces religious business owners to participate in the provision of services that clearly violate their consciences.

Protecting their rights to abstain from the mandate does not in any way endanger the rights of women or their health since Hobby Lobby employees are free to purchase such drugs on their own. What the government wants is not to protect the freedom to use contraception—which is not in question—but to be able to make religious organizations as well as private businesses pay for it and thus compromise their principles. Their reasoning is twisted, but at its heart is the belief that government can run roughshod over rights in order to obtain some larger good such as free health services. Upholding such a mandate would mean a re-writing of the First Amendment that would protect private expressions of faith but prohibit its exercise in the public square. The administration seeks to interpret the law in such a manner as to require people to choose between their faith and the survival of their enterprises. Our framers believed that government moral coercion of this sort was beyond the pale. That is why they sought to create a constitutional framework that ensured that while we would have no established church, neither would our government seek to constrain religious freedom.

As we saw with the recent furor over a revision in the Arizona version of RFRA, it is entirely possible for concerns about the rights of women or gays to be used as a weapon in order to squelch discussions about religious liberty and the Constitution. But the Supreme Court should be immune to such cynical scare mongering by the administration and the liberal mainstream media. Let us hope the justices ignore the attempt to buffalo them into suppressing religious freedom in the name of upholding ObamaCare.