This is why we have separation of church and state, to guard this country from religious whackos like Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant.In April, Bryant signed a sweeping anti-LGBT law that allows public and private employers to discriminate against gay people and anyone else such as interracial couples, atheists, and people who have had premarital sex if they claim to have a  sincerely held religious belief. This abuse of religious liberty by Republicans has now reached fever pitch as many red states are adopting similar laws as a way to be bigoted assholes toward to certain groups of people. And now Bryant, despite being criticized by people in his own state, is calling upon Christians across the country to martyr themselves for the right to discriminate.During the right-wing Watchmen on the Wall conference, Family Research Council hate group leader Tony Perkins introduced Bryant as the winner of the first ever  Samuel Adams Religious Freedom Award  for passing the bigoted law in his state, which means Samuel Adams is probably rolling in his grave.Perkins declared that all elected officials should be  ministers of God  and Bryant kissed Perkins  ass by comparing him to David in the Biblical story of David and Goliath. I remember in Sunday school, reading one of my favorite stories. It was about a giant, a bad giant, who came into a valley one day and he called to the Israelites,  Send down your champion and let me vanquish him.  We were in that valley, but Tony Perkins was there with us. He was there as surely as Our Lord and Savior, as surely as the God of all gods stood there with us. And I can tell you how fortunate we are in this nation and in this organization to have a man of faith and leadership in Tony. God bless you for what you do. Bryant then proceeded to whine about the opposition to the discriminatory law he signed claiming that they don t know the history of Christians being persecuted and said Christians are willing to stand in line for crucifixion to secure their right to discriminate. They don t know that Christians have been persecuted throughout the ages. They don t know that if it takes crucifixion, we will stand in line before abandoning our faith and our belief in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So if we are going to stand, now is the time and this is the place. Here s the video via Right Wing Watch:This is proof of how insane conservative  Christians  have become. They imagine that they are being persecuted because they aren t allowed to refuse service to people they hate. Of course, if Christians were really being persecuted in this country they would be dragged out in the streets and beaten or killed as they are in countries where Christianity is a minority religion. That s what real persecution looks like.But Bryant is hardly the first Mississippi governor to use religion to justify bigotry. As a two-term governor and US Senator from the state in the 1920s through late 1940s, Bilbo believed that God sanctioned racism.According to Think Progress:For Senator Bilbo racism was more that just an ideology, it was a sincerely held religious belief. In a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, Bilbo wrote that  [p]urity of race is a gift of God . . . . And God, in his infinite wisdom, has so ordained it that when man destroys his racial purity, it can never be redeemed.  Allowing  the blood of the races [to] mix,  according to Bilbo, was a direct attack on the  Divine plan of God.  There  is every reason to believe that miscengenation and amalgamation are sins of man in direct defiance to the will of God. Another Mississippi governor named Ross Barnett was still repeating the same justification in 1960.  The good Lord was the original segregationist,  he claimed.Segregation has since been outlawed, but conservatives are still using the same argument to justify their bigotry and it s going to be fun watching a federal court put them in their place once again.Featured image via screenshot 