Judging by the end-times rhetoric employed by some journalists, bloggers and Twitterati in response to the US Supreme Court’s decision on Hobby Lobby, one might be forgiven for thinking that contraception had been banned nationwide, fundamentalist corporation owners authorised to micromanage their employees’ sex lives, and women declared second-class citizens.

A rather popular image doing the rounds on Twitter shows an ultrasound scan of an unborn baby with the word “person” stamped over it, a picture of a high-rise corporate building with the same stamp… and a picture of a woman with the word “meh” over it.

So let’s all calm down and consider what the ruling actually means.

1. People in the US can still buy contraception with their own money. Obviously. What’s more, Hobby Lobby’s employee health insurance scheme still covers 16 forms of artificial birth control, including condoms and the pill. All the judgment says is that forcing Hobby Lobby to pay cover that includes a further four forms of contraception that also act as abortifacients is not the “least restrictive means possible” of fulfilling the Obama administration’s goal of making contraception more affordable, and that doing so therefore violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which passed the Senate 97-3 under the Clinton adminstration. That’s all.

2. The ruling doesn’t at all rest on a “corporations are people” logic. First of all, it only applies to “closely held” businesses (those where more than 50% of the value of its outstanding stock directly or indirectly owned by five or fewer individuals), not publicly traded corporations.

Second, as Peter Suderman points out over at Reason, the decision doesn’t ascribe personhood and the right of conscientious objection to some amorphous corporate identity, but to the people who actually do the employing. In other words, corporations aren’t people, but the human beings who run them are.

3. As for women being second-class citizens… well, let’s (again) ignore all the women who identify as pro-life (41% in the States, according to the latest Gallup poll). Let’s ignore gendercide through abortion. Let’s assume that support for abortion is identical to support for gender equality (no-one will be particularly surprised that I find this line of reasoning… unimpressive).

After this decision, US women can still purchase abortifacient drugs and devices in almost every US state. All that’s happening here is that their employers (do I really need to bring up the fact that, you know, women run businesses too?) don’t have to pay for them to obtain it if paying for abortions would violate their conscience.

As the National Review’s editorial puts it, this decision is no sweeping victory for religious freedom, and the fact that people are getting so heated over it is telling. It seems everyone must endorse every single aspect of the sex revolution or face dire consequences.

Note: Apparently some outraged twitterers mistakenly aimed their Hobby-Lobby-related ire at the private news source SCOTUSBlog, mistaking it for an organ of the Supreme Court itself. Thankfully, for those of us getting slighly tired of undying rage, ScotusBlog took it in good spirits and retweeted some of the best rants… with commentary.

UPDATE: Some excellent takes on the case from libertarians Julian Sanchez, who reckons the outrage is all about symbolism, and Megan McArdle, who reckons it’s mostly about fundraising. The ever-excellent Ross Douthat calls for a bit more clear-eyed realism from the culture war’s winnners.

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, NARAL board member Jessica Valenti insists that “sex is a basic human need.” I mean, is this really where we are now? The article repeats the very boring assertion that social conservatives only care about sexual morality for women, but I’d love to know how widely her basic thesis is shared on, say, Irish twitter.