Photo: AP

It’s been a banner week for Mississippi, where white people are currently celebrating the Confederacy and, as of today, all business owners—public and private—can refuse service to gay people by claiming it’s against their religion.

Mississippi governor Phil Bryant—the brilliant mind that brought his constituents a Confederacy Heritage Month proclamation that did not once mention slavery—signed Mississippi House Bill 1523, or the “Religious Liberties Accommodations Act,” into law today, ensuring Mississippians can immediately begin to discriminate against gay, transgendered, and even unmarried cohabitating people without legal consequence.

Via CBS, the bill’s language seeks to protect the state’s most closed-minded bigots from having to to treat all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as people.

The measure’s stated intention is to protect those who believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, that sexual relations should only take place inside such marriages, and that male and female genders are unchangeable.

Bryant, bless his heart, says on Twitter the bill was designed in the “most targeted manner to prevent government interference in the lives of the people from which all the power to the state is derived,” (as long as they’re not gay.)