“This is how we should order our lives together,” he said. “And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality.”
“You should always check yourselves,” he continued. “Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?”
“And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.'”
Assuming he actually believes this, he just needs to extend that logic one tiny step forward. A more plausible explanation is he knows that it isn’t true but still needs some sort of argument that explains the regime’s repugnant behaviour. Those are your dismal options. Reminds me of that South African leader who claimed he was raping girls as a cure for AIDS because raping girls has bad optics.