HB1523 was the most sweeping law passed in 2016 that targeted LGBTQ Americans for discrimination. It gave special rights for Christians in Mississippi to circumscribe the constitutional rights and freedoms of gay and transgender individuals in access to housing, employment, public accommodations, health care, adoptions, and marriage. That's why a federal district judge promptly ruled it unconstitutional last summer, blocking it from taking effect.

But now Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is hitting back with a brief co-authored by the ignominious legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. Among other outlandish arguments included in the brief, Bryant's lawyers allege that all-powerful “homosexuals” aren’t the ones being bullied:

The far more plausible candidate for “political powerlessness” would be the devout Christian mom-and-pop-shop owners who are being bullied by ideologues in the political and business worlds. See id. (“[T]he relentless pressure of state civil rights commissions makes these small religious businesses a “discrete and insular” minority . . . . It is this loss of tolerance, this self-righteous indignation, this vilification of a vulnerable religious minority that makes this recent chorus of incivility so disgraceful.”)

Yes, Christians, that vulnerable religious minority being victimized by those expressing "self-righteous indignation." Ha! Mark Joseph Stern cites several other fanciful arguments in what he calls the "wildly unhinged brief."