Now that Australia has legalized marriage equality, it’s a good time to check back in with the Christian bigots who vowed to get divorced if that ever happened since allowing gay people to marry would totally ruin their relationship… and they were determined to reach that conclusion one way or another.

Nick and Sarah Jensen made that promise in 2015, but their plan hit an early snag when critics pointed out that Australian law prohibited legal divorces when the couple still planned to live together and have children. The law required couples to be separated and live apart for a full year before the government will grant a divorce.

His entire statement boils down to, “The state won’t let us get officially divorced since we’d still be living together, so stop bothering us.”

“My previous public comments regarding civil divorce never envisaged me separating from my wife, but rather our marriage from the state,” he said.

“The legislation currently makes it untenable for us to do this under the law. The point we were highlighting and that still stands however is the fact that a redefinition of marriage changes the agreement under which we were originally married.

“We will be making no further comment.”

That’s one hell of a way to try to get people off your back. The law was already in place when they made their idiotic statement years ago. The only thing that changed is that the Jensens are now laughingstocks, no one ever felt bad about their sham divorce, and they’ve become symbols of how Christians have no legitimate reasons to oppose marriage equality.

When last we chatted, I talked of how congressional elections have shifted to reflect national politics more than local influences. Importantly, I noted that this may be less the result of ideological “polarization” — the process by which the beliefs of partisans move left/right — and more the result of partisan “sorting.”

But polarization does exist, and it is real. This is especially true of elites in government: congresspeople in particular.

Ian McDonald, a visiting professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon had the incredible idea to graph the distribution of House members’ ideology over time. Using the distribution of a mathematical representation of ideology called DW-NOMINATE, McDonald showed how Republicans have moved right on mostly-economic policies over time, while Democrats have generally stayed ideologically the same.

I have added to his graphic (which appears on the left below) with a second mathematical representation of ideology in DW-NOMINATE – a so-called second “dimension” – to show how Democrats have changed in ways McDonald’s graphic does not show. This second dimension is often referred to as a “social” dimension, mainly encompassing the shift in views towards race that started to flip the parties in the last 1960s.