Last month, the North Carolina legislature overrode the governor’s veto to pass a law allowing state officials to refuse to perform marriages or issue marriage licenses to gay couples in the name of “religious liberty,” and Matt Barber hailed the development as a “good first step” toward totally eliminating the “sexually immoral scourge of same-sex marriage.”

“This is a good first step,” Barber said on Liberty Counsel’s “Faith and Freedom” radio program today, alongside co-host Mat Staver. “It’s a step in the right direction. Ultimately, the endgame here, Mat, is same-sex marriage cannot be. It is a contradiction in terms, it’s self-defeating, it’s incongruous, it’s an oxymoron, it’s all of these things and more and it is immoral. So the sexually immoral scourge of same-sex marriage needs to be wiped out here in the United States. That’s the endgame.”

Barber went on to declared that similar laws need to be passed in every state to protect anti-gay public officials and Christian business owners from having to “participate in sinful behavior, which is a same-sex wedding ceremony.”

“It is a pagan rite, a ritual that is anti-Christian, it is counter-Christian and it is sinful,” he said, “and so we need more robust religious liberty protection laws in North Carolina and in every state of the union.”