Texas congressman doesn't want gay people in space
Technically Incorrect: In a fascinating speech, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert says that if you were to send 40 people up in a spacecraft to find us a new place to live, none should be gay.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Rep. Louie Gohmert thinks gay people can't save us.
Politicians sometimes have interesting views.
As we're seeing in the current presidential campaign, on occasion they even express them.
It's heartening, therefore, to hear what Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, a Republican, thinks about space.
Speaking in the House of Representatives, Gohmert offered some perspective on life and the universe.
He explained that God made people male and female. There were no "question marks." Gohmert said that throughout history trans people have been thought of as merely "perverse."
This led him, in a slightly meandering manner, to the notion of humanity's ending. It was quite a meandering:
I really wonder how many people in [the House], who have the ultimate power to decide whether humanity would go forward or not -- whether it was an asteroid coming, something that would end humanity on Earth as dinosaurs were ended at one time -- 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?
Yes, he wanted those listening to put themselves in the place of a "modern-day Noah."
He conceded that some animals are actually gay, but simultaneously suggested it wasn't worth taking gay animals into space either to save our species and the wildlife kingdom.
The United States, he said, was founded by "the grace of God." God created it "as an instrument to bless the world."
"This nation -- even for those that have not recognized the exceptional nature of the United States, it's still a fact," he said.
Some might wish to remind Gohmert that the notion of American exceptionalism was created by, well, Joseph Stalin.
And facts have always been tricky things. This is something that even Gohmert's own presidential nominee admits.
I prefer to focus, though, on the idea that our Earth will soon be too rotten to inhabit. Stephen Hawking, among others, believes that we will indeed have to escape before too long.
This means we'll all have to escape. We'll be leaping on rockets mass-produced by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and heading for the Planet Zog.
And by the time we get there, I fancy, science will have made all sorts of progress.
We'll have found all sorts of interesting ways to reproduce, ones that intellectuals such as Louie Gohmert couldn't conceive of.
We'll also hopefully have found a way to do without politics at all.