Heres another fine mess youve gotten us into, Stanley.
"Here's another fine mess you've gotten us into, Stanley." Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

Okay, so you already know that the Republican candidates don't care for homosexuals. Obviously. Their conservative base has been gunning for gays โ€” sometimes literally โ€” for decades, and the right-wing obsession with regulating queer sex shows no sign of stopping.

So you will certainly not be surprised that some of the leading candidates have signed a pledge to push for an anti-gay bill if any of them win the presidency. But get this: tucked away in that bill, which is supposedly designed to target queer people, is a little provision that would let them punish any single straight person who has sex outside of marriage.

It's called the "First Amendment Defense Act," and so far a pledge to pass it has been signed by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Carly Fiorina. Obviously, we don't need to worry too much about some of those jackasses becoming president (so long, Rick!) but there's support for this bill at the top of the race as well. (Bush, Graham, and Paul also expressed support for FADA, and Trump said in a letter that he'd sign it.)

So what would this rotten bill do? Well, it's a tangle of legalese (it forbids "discriminatory action against a person on the basis that such person believes or acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction"), so it takes a little work to decipher it.

But the short version is that it lets anyone pull a Kim Davis โ€” that is, refuse to do their job or follow the law โ€” if they claim to believe that:

"(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."

So obviously point 1 is bad for the gays, as the curious case of Ms. Davis has already indicated. Anyone who wants to discriminate against gay couples would be allowed to do so, which means an IRS agent could refuse to process a gay couple's tax return, or a bus driver could kick a gay couple off for holding hands, or an employer could refuse to provide health care for a gay worker's spouse.

Of course, the law doesn't apply similarly to married straight couples, so if you believe that engaging in multiple heterosexual marriages, such as those of Kim Davis, is immoral, well, too bad. Conservatives always complain about gays wanting "special rights" and now they are literally demanding special rights for themselves.

But now what's this in point 2 about sexual relations? Well, FADA broadens the allowed discrimination to include unmarried straight people who have sex. That means you could be evicted for having an overnight date, or a teacher could be fired for becoming pregnant. Employers could say "nope" to providing birth control... and doesn't that story sound kinda familiar? Oh, right, it's Hobby Lobby all over again. Except on an even bigger scale. We're basically talking about a Super Hobby Lobby with this FADA bill.

Naturally, women would be disproportionately affected, since men can just lie about having had sex, but the outcomes for women are sometimes more difficult to deny. Pregnant women and single moms, get ready for a situation where you can be evicted, fired, denied service, even kicked out of homeless shelters... just because.

And so once again, we have Republicans โ€” the party of small government! โ€” poking their nose into your bedroom, making up rules about who should have sex (married straight people) and who shouldn't (everyone else). The most galling thing about this bill is that it really doesn't "defend" the First Amendment; in fact, it violates the First Amendment by enshrining a specific religious belief into law.

This election season is a crazy clown parade, and I'm completely in favor of finding funny stuff to laugh about (like how Ted Cruz harasses his wife with showtunes). But the sinister side to an election is the fact that one of the clowns is going to be allowed to become president, and that means we'll have to live with the terrible promises they made and the evil supporters they pandered to in order to win.