Michigan Republicans have delayed progress on a measure to include sexual orientation as a legally protected category in the 1976 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, the state’s anti-discrimination law. State representative-elect Todd Courser has emerged as one of the leading opponents of the effort, warning this week that the measure would give “special rights to the LGBT community, while placing the rights of religious groups and individuals in peril.”

His Thanksgiving message to supporters last week was even more blunt, citing the story of the Pilgrims, or at least the myth that they came in search of religious freedom, as a reason to oppose protections for gays and lesbians.

“Thanksgiving is about the impossible journey of a small group of worshipers who took flight from oppression to have the freedom to practice their religion without the interference of government,” Courser wrote in the message, “we are now, if this expansion to Elliott Larsen passes at the hands of my own party, at the point where the group that will be discriminated against is Christians and any other faith that chooses to stand against the LGBT activists — we will no longer have the freedom to practice our religion or have freedom of speech that our Founders personally sacrificed to give us.”

Warning of an attempt to “destroy freedoms of religion and speech for our children and their children” and “institutionalize discrimination against Christians and other faiths,” Courser wrote that lawmakers who back the effort are “promoting evil.”