The Pentagon issued a directive this week which required the military to treat all its married members equally, whether gay or straight. That ought to do it, right? Everyone should be happy.

Everyone but National Guard members in Texas and Mississippi, that is. Each of those states says “Oh, no, Pentagon. State law supersedes your puny edict, so our “marriage is only between a man and a woman law takes precedent, and all our gay members will have to find some Federal base to get their paperwork processed. Such papers mustn’t sully our state armed service members’ administrative hands or inboxes.”

It’s miserably petty of Texas’s Rick Perry and Mississippi’s Phil Bryant, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from Republican governors in the Deep South.