Perhaps he thought no one would pay attention to his floor speech—it was only days before the Congress would go on their Memorial Day vacations—but Republican congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas decided to give a dire warning about the perils of gay people in space.

In the middle of a Thursday speech on the House floor, Gohmert, who once proclaimed that gay-rights activists were like Nazis, suddenly started talking about the film The Martian, in which Matt Damon’s astronaut character gets stranded on Mars and is forced to survive there for nearly two years.

Posing a hypothetical doomsday situation, with, say, “an asteroid coming, something that would end humanity on Earth, as dinosaurs were ended at one time. O.K., we’ve got a spaceship that can go, as Matt Damon did in the movie, plant a colony somewhere. We can have humans survive this terrible disaster about to befall. If you could decide what 40 people you put on the spacecraft that would save humanity, how many of those would be same-sex couples?” (The implication, of course, being that they would not want to have children.)

Saying that such a situation would make the government “a modern-day Noah,” Gohmert appealed to Congress’s collective reason: “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?”

(Hypothetically, gay and lesbian couples could conceive children with artificial insemination, technology that should be available to any civilization that could build a space colony.)

According to Right Wing Watch, this is a more sci-fi version of a former argument Gohmert once made about what would happen if only gay people were stranded on a desert island. “Let’s come back in 100 to 200 years and see which one nature says is the preferred marriage,” he argued.