Jon Stewart Destroys the "Fucked-Up" Defense of Indiana's Religious Freedom Bill

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show may have taken last week off, but the soon-to-be-replaced host is hardly a lame duck. On Monday night's show, he came out with both pistols drawn and aimed at defenders of Indiana's religious freedom bill.

"They've got nothing against gay people! And they use analogies to clarify their position," Stewart said. "Which the analogies do — just not in the way they intended." In fact, those analogies reveal the real problem lying within the religious freedom debate.

The comparisons conservative commentators made have become increasingly ugly. Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum compares gays' requests for service to the Westboro Baptist Church asking a gay man to print "God Hates Fags" flyers. Other analogies connect gays to KKK members and Nazi sympathizers.

Of course, Stewart sees those lines of logic for the bigoted piles of crap they are. "You see people celebrating love as a hate group," Stewart said, astonished.

Efforts are now in motion in the Indiana statehouse to "fix" the bill, adding language specifically to protect LGBTQ persons from being refused service. Unfortunately, as Stewart pointed out at the end of the segment, the battle is just beginning. In much of Indiana, even if LGBTQ people can order a wedding cake, they aren't protected from getting fired based on their sexual orientation.

This is the real problem: It's not about cakes or wedding planning. It's about hate and bigotry so entrenched in people's minds that causes them to connect catering a same-sex marriage ceremony to groups with histories of mass murder. Even as this bill gets "fixed," LGBTQ Americans across the country still have to fear for their jobs or, worse, their livelihoods.

Luckily, as Stewart noted, until Indiana catches up with the saner parts of the country, there's always the knowledge that revenge is sweet.

Watch the full clip below.