Last week, Newt Gingrich appeared on the Houston-area program “The Sam Malone Show” to promote his new novel, “Duplicity.”

The former House speaker kicked things off by praising Houston voters for repealing the city’s LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination law, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which he said should inspire Congress to reject a Department of Education finding that Title IX prohibits discrimination against transgender students.

“I was delighted to see that the people of Houston voted for common sense,” he said. “In fact, I hope the Congress is going to pick up on Houston and do the same thing to a new Department of Education regulation that says that boys who want to can declare themselves transgender and use girls’ bathrooms in high school, which I think is just one of those things where you shake your head and you wonder how really lacking in understanding of human nature the bureaucrats are who write this stuff.”

He called the growth in transgender rights a “strange” cultural development, which he then used as a way to criticize President Obama’s policy in Syria: “They are as far out of touch with reality in foreign policy as they are in these cultural values they keep trying to impose on the rest of us.”