Jason and David Benham, two right-wing activists with experience in portraying themselves as Christian martyrs, hailed the latest “victim” of religious persecution, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, in a column for the far-right outlet WorldNetDaily this weekend:

Her jailing last week reveals that we have deep spiritual and political fractures in our foundation as a nation. … We have abandoned the God of the Bible, the very God of our founding. Our spiritual foundation has been compromised. George Washington said, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.” When we reject God’s law by removing His influence from every vestige of society, how can we rightly govern ourselves? The answer is: We can’t, and we’re not.

Of course, Washington never actually said that.

As the Mount Vernon Association points out, this remark that is sometimes attributed to Washington first emerged in 1835, decades after Washington’s death.

(Incidentally, the Benham’s father, Religious Right activist Flip Benham, has led protests at the home of Judge David Bunning to hold him “in contempt of the Court of Almighty God.”)

Nonetheless, the Benham twins went on to claim that gay marriage is still illegal in Kentucky: