An excellent article on the "Think Progress" website outlining just how the "Religious Rights" movement has it's core roots in the history of segregation-era legislation of the past in this country.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
— Judge Leon M. Bazile, January 6, 1959
Back when Arizona was looking to pass such legislation, both McCain and Romney were firmly against it, ans as the article goes on to say, they asked then governor Jan Brewer to veto it.
Indeed, three state senators who voted for this very bill urged Brewer to veto it before she finally did so on Wednesday, confessing that they “made a mistake” when they voted for it to become law.
The article goes on to to discuss the history of the great segregationist Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who:
After two non-consecutive terms as governor, Bilbo won a U.S. Senate seat campaigning against “farmer murderers, corrupters of Southern womanhood, [skunks] who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms” and a host of other, equally colorful foes.
But his perverted lunacy didn't stop there, he also was a fierce segregationist:
Bilbo was also a virulent racist. “I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n[*]ggers away from the polls,” Bilbo proclaimed during his successful reelection campaign in 1946. He was a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, telling Meet the Press that same year that “[n]o man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.” During a filibuster of an anti-lynching bill, Bilbo claimed that the bill will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.
I am not going to paraphrase and blockquote the entire article, but would suggest that you follow the link to "Think Progress", as you will find it a good read.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
Be safe out there...