“This was the week of Kim Davis,” Real Time host Bill Maher declared Friday, three days after the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples walked out of jail to a cheering crowd of Bible-thumpers who praised her for refusing to follow the law or do her damn job.She’s Republicans’ new hero, the “Rosa Parks of homophobia,” as Maher dubbed her Friday, matched in bigotry only by her hand-holding partner in hatred, Mike Huckabee, “the white Al Sharpton.”“They all got out there and said, ‘God’s law supersedes the courts, which actually is a very strong legal argument—in Saudi Arabia, but not here in America,” Maher said. “I don’t want to say that the super religious types are always hypocrites but here she is. Standing up for traditional marriage and then we find out she’s had multiple affairs, conceived twins out of wedlock, and has been married four times! That’s why she can’t give marriage licenses to the gays—she used them all for herself!”Daily Beast columnist Michael Moynihan, who was one of three panelists along with author Salman Rushdie and Center for Equal Opportunity Chairwoman Linda Chavez, had a sunnier outlook on Davis’s intentions. “I think that her intention here is to sort of slowly bring people around to the idea of gay marriage. She comes out of jail, every Republican is waiting to take their photo with her… everyone’s holding up crosses and Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is playing,” he said, describing the nightmarish scene.

Maher also offered Davis’s husband, who wore an unironic pair of overalls and a straw hat to the ‘Welcome Back from Jail’ rally, some advice: “When people already think you’re brainless, it doesn’t help to dress like the Scarecrow.”Rushdie chalked up Davis’s delusional martyr complex to a “classic trope of the religious bigot.”“While they are denying people their rights, they claim their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they’re behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party,” he said.“Especially Christians,” Maher added. “I mean, the whole thing is based on a persecution complex. So when they say things like they’re criminalizing Christianity—really? You’re 70 percent of the population.”“But everybody does this,” Rushdie countered. “In India right now, [which has] a 85 percent Hindu majority, leaders are saying Hinduism is being threatened. In the Islamic world, the paranoia is routine: ‘The world is anti-Muslim.’ And so this is just a trope that they're stealing from other bigots.”Hateful, hypocritical, and unoriginal? Pick a fatal flaw, Davis.