DAVID RIVKIN & ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY: Gay Rights, Religious Freedom and the Law: There is a better route to protections than the battle in Indiana.

There is no federal law prohibiting private discrimination based on sexual orientation. An executive order by President Obama in 2014 bans such discrimination only for federal workers and contractors. About 20 states and some municipalities prohibit sexual-orientation discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations. But the majority of states still don’t proscribe discrimination based on sexual orientation, though discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity or national origin is banned.

The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed by President Clinton in 1993. It represented a backlash against the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith. That decision held that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause doesn’t allow a religious exemption from laws of general applicability—e.g., compulsory military service, or prohibitions on drug use or animal cruelty—even if those laws substantially burden religious exercise.

The federal RFRA law supplanted Smith, declaring that the government could substantially burden religious exercise only upon proving a “compelling” government interest for doing so, and using only the “least restrictive means” of furthering that interest. The Supreme Court, for example, recently affirmed that the federal RFRA allowed Hobby Lobby, a corporation closely held by religious owners, to refuse participation in ObamaCare’s contraceptive mandate, which would have required the company to provide contraceptives that may destroy an already-fertilized egg.

Because the federal RFRA applies only to federal actions, 20 states have passed their own religious-freedom laws designed to provide the same protection against state-imposed religious burdens. Another 11 states have implemented similar protections through court decisions, based on state constitutions.

So why have the latest religious-freedom laws been so controversial? RFRA has become a political focal point for pent-up anger over the paucity of legal protections against LGBT discrimination. A specific controversy is over the application of such laws to lawsuits between private parties.

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