The Religious Right likes to moan about their “religious freedom.”  When they do this, it is useful to remember two things:

1.  They do not care about anyone’s religious freedom but their own, because for them, “religious freedom” is actually code for their belief that the true practice of their religion necessarily includes lording it obnoxiously over everyone else.

2.  They actually believe that they speak for a majority of religious Americans.  They don’t. 

But you see, the times are changing.  Many churches in the South perform same-sex weddings!  There are several in my neighborhood, in fact.  They may not be legally sanctioned, but as church rites go, they’re just the same as heterosexual marriages.  The Religious Right wants to have it both ways, though.  They want to have their rights to perform only the marriages they want protected [as they should], but they also want to butt into state affairs and decide who can and cannot get married in a civil contract.  Meanwhile, they also seek to deny loving churches the ability to perform same-sex weddings if they so choose.

A church in Kentucky has decided to take a stand.  Think Progress:

Members of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, located in Louisville, KY, unanimously voted to stop signing marriage licenses for heterosexual couples until same-sex couples are afforded equal marriage rights. The decision comes at the same time that a CNN poll shows that a majority of Americans now support legalizing same-sex marriages, the fourth poll to show similar results in the past eight months.

In 2008, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (DBCC) decided to designate itself an Open and Affirming Community of Faith, signifying its “commitment to full acceptance of all people, regardless of race, gender, age, or sexual orientation,” and this decision keeps it in line with those values, church leaders said. The church will continue to perform religious wedding ceremonies but will no longer sign official licenses, according to an official release on its web site.

Read the whole piece, because all too often the Religious Right pretends that it speaks for religious Americans.  That is a laughable claim.  The bigots of our society dwindle in number every year, either due to changed hearts and minds or due to the fact that, as a segment of the population, they skew much older.  Meanwhile, religious congregations all over the country are unable to treat their parishioners equally when it comes to something as simple as marriage.  And as the polls have been showing, the public officially supports marriage equality.  It’s sad that this church has been put in this position, but we applaud them for their principled stand.

are also making plans to go to this, without a hint of irony:

Kentucky’s Democratic governor Steve Beshear announced yesterday that a creationism theme park — dubbed “Ark Encounter” — is expected to open in the state in 2014. The governor boasted that the park would have a $250 million impact on the local economy annually. The park “will feature a 500-foot-long wooden replica of Noah’s Ark containing live animals such as juvenile giraffes.”

The project is a collaboration with a non-profit organization Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum in Boone County, KY. The Nation’s Chris Hayes noted on MSNBC last night that Answers in Genesis “is dedicated to portraying the Bible’s view of history. Among their claims, the Earth was created in six days, just 6,000 years ago, and that at one time, man and velociraptor co-existed peacefully.” (Of course, dinosaurs went extinct nearly 65 million years ago.)

[...]

[Barefoot and Progressive's Joe] Sonka added that most of the questions during the press conference were “about the dimensions of the Ark, which couldn’t have been more useless considering that the governor of our state was up on stage presenting his endorsement of a theme park devoted to intellectually molesting children.” “Be ashamed, Kentucky. Be very ashamed,” Sonka wrote.

The Courier-Journal notes that “the National Center for Science Education asserts that ‘students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level.’”

Just to keep things in perspective.

They’re adamantly opposed to gay families living with the same protections as other families, and they believe Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Or something.

More here.

UPDATE: Also, what PZ said.

And now, introducing a particularly unintelligent bigot named Jaye Collins, who is a basketball coach in Kentucky for high performing female athletes:

I started the Lady Legends program with the support of my wife, Kari, in hopes of encouraging young girls to be proud and secure in not being part of the lesbian and homosexual lifestyle which is so prevalent in woman’s/girl’s athletics. Many girls, as early as middle school, are being influenced or “tested”, or converted and convinced that if they play sports, specifically basketball, they must be, should be, or need to be gay.

I believe that we should encourage girls to glorify God and please Jesus Christ in their decision making processes. I know this is not the socially accepted or politically correct perspective, but our goal is H.O.O.P.S…..Helping Others Obtain Personal Salvation.

Some of your girls are lesbians anyway.

That being said, Cyd Ziegler at OutSports asks the pertinent question:

What athlete, male or female, is being told they need to be gay if they want to play sports?

Yeah, I really do not know, Cyd!  I mean, sure, there are gay athletes and straight athletes and bisexual athletes, but their sexuality really doesn’t have anything to do with their athletic ability!

This is what happens when you cling to pig-ignorant, debunked worldviews.

Students at Kentucky’s Murray State University engaged in “live homosexual acts” in public on Friday to raise “awareness about the lifestyle of gay members of the Murray State campus,” according to a campus newspaper.

The live outdoor acts consisted of studying, reading, and talking — behind a sign that starkly advertised “live homosexual acts.”

Antigay and ex-gay activists were strangely uninterested in taking pictures of real gay people engaging in real homosexual activities. Here was a prime opportunity for Fred Phelps and Peter LaBarbera to hold up No Studying, No Talking, and No Sexual Honesty signs – and they missed it entirely.

Hat tip: QueerTwoCents, InterstateQ

Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 50,000 gay Germans were incarcerated and as many as 10,000 were slaughtered in the concentration camps.

But that horrible fact has been declared politically inconvenient by the religious right, and so Kentucky’s General Assembly has removed mention of gay victims from a new law making additional Holocaust-education curriculum materials available to eighth-graders. (Read More)