In a speech on the House floor Thursday, a United States congressman talked about interstellar travel, the survival of the human species after an earth-destroying cataclysm, and gay people. And who could forget the comparison to Noah’s Ark?

Texas Representative Louie Gohmert addressed the issues of homosexuality and transgenderism, eventually introducing a hypothetical space colony to make his point. In the case of a natural disaster that made Earth uninhabitable, would members of Congress pick same-sex couples to found a space colony?

We can have humans survive this terrible disaster. If you can decide what forty people to put on the spacecraft that would save humanity, how many of those would be same-sex couples? You’re wanting to save humankind for posterity, basically a modern-day Noah. You have that ability to be a modern-day Noah, you can preserve life. How many same-sex couples would you take from the animal kingdom and from humans, to put on a spacecraft to perpetuate humanity and the wildlife kingdom?

Naturally, Gohmert meant to emphasize that only heterosexual relationships can produce children. “That’s why it’s been called part of the Natural Law, given by the Creator,” he explained. This is true, but the way in which Gohmert went about presenting it has raised more than a few eyebrows.

Gohmert has been hailed as the “Padishah Emperor for Life of the Crazy People” by Esquire’s Charles Pierce, and comments like this explain why. In response to these recent comments, that magazine’s Jack Holmes shot back, suggesting, “Maybe it’s time to ask if Louie should be allowed on the spaceship.” (On a side note, anyone asking this question has clearly not tasted Gohmert’s delicious ribs, which are the talk of both sides of the aisle in Congress.)

Ironically, Gohmert’s gay space colony comments came in the middle of a speech which emphasized compassion, along with Christian principles. Of transgender people, the congressman declared, “These are people we need to love and encourage.”

He did acknowledge the fact that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders long included transgenderism and homosexuality as mental disorders (they no longer do so). But even while emphasizing that “educated people said that’s perverse,” Gohmert said these people were “pitied, loved, encouraged,” and deserve love and encouragement.

Then, of course, he criticized the Obama administration’s transgender advice to schools. “Now we have a government that says, ‘Forget what the Bible says. Forget what Moses said. Forget what Jesus said, when he quoted Moses verbatim and then added, what God has joined together, nobody should separate.'”

Next Page: The most compelling part of his speech, religious freedom.

The most compelling — and least silly — part of his speech actually came after the gay spaceships comments. “When we continue to abolish the first words of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, and we continue to prohibit the free exercise of religion, we don’t have much longer to go,” Gohmert declared.

This apocalyptic warning may be hyperbole, but Gohmert does have a point. The LGBT bathroom battles roiling America are disturbing and can get downright silly — with both sides talking past one another and fierce distrust, with words like “bigot” thrown out against ideas which were not at all controversial a few years ago.

Nevertheless, this hypothetical Noahic journey into outer space where gays are not preferred is one of the silliest ways to address the issue, and Gohmert has inadvertently set conservatives back with his overactive imagination.

Watch the video on the next page.