With LGBT rights activists winning court victories in state after state, the Christian Right has opened a new battlefield in the nation’s cultural war, and they’re leaving nothing behind in their effort to enact Jim Crow-era laws against gay Americans.

Taking inspiration from the Hobby Lobby case – a case that threatens to allow a corporation to invoke religion to exempt itself from a law (contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act) it doesn’t like – Republican lawmakers have pushed a slew of bills under the guise of ‘religious freedom.” This means businesses or individuals would be granted not only the right to deny services or employment to LGBT American, but also immunity against prosecution for discrimination.

Last week, Republicans in Kansas’ lower house passed a bill that would have effectively allowed Christian business owners or employees the right to deny service to same-sex couples. Think segregated restaurants in the Deep South prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and you’re drawing a mental picture of what the Christian Right hoped to achieve in Kansas. The language of the bill would have allowed restaurants, for instance, to deny service to ‘any marriage, domestic partnership,” or ‘civil union” that ‘would be contrary to […]