Rep. Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin, joined Milwaukee-area radio host Vicki McKenna on Friday to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down state bans on same-sex marriage. Grothman told McKenna that the Supreme Court’s reasoning, which was based on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, was an affront to the Americans who died in the Civil War because it was “a strong religious war to further a Christian lifestyle by getting rid of slavery.”

“Our president during the Civil War was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, who was known as the most biblical of presidents, somebody who quoted the Bible a lot,” he said. “In the Civil War, some 600,000 people died in a country that was much less populated than that today. And it was a much more religious country and I think a lot of people who died fighting in that war felt they died fighting for a religious cause, you know, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and all that.

“I think it would shock those people who died in that war to find out the constitutional amendment which was ratified kind of as a culmination of their great efforts and their great deaths would be 150 years later, a little less than 150 years later, used by these five robed, arrogant, robed people to take this constitutional amendment and say that that constitutional amendment that was drafted after the Civil War was in fact an amendment designed to say that same-sex marriage had to be legal.”

He added that the decision is “particularly offensive” given that the 14th Amendment was “drafted by a people who felt they had just engaged in a strong religious war to further a Christian lifestyle by getting rid of slavery.”