Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert Mixes Marriage Equality, Bestiality, and Gun Control

The ever-outrageous congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas has done it again, equating marriage equality with bestiality and somehow bringing gun regulation into the mix.

Gohmert did a conference call in February with a new conservative group called Tea Party Unity; his call was publicized this week by People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch blog.

Limiting the number of rounds of ammunition a gun owner could buy, Gohmert said on the call, is "kind of like marriage when you say it's not a man and a woman anymore, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal? There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage, and it's the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it's just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal."

Gohmert also said antidiscrimination laws threaten religious freedom, saying they are "going to devastate the church, the synagogue, places of worship that hire people, because ultimately they're saying you have to hire whatever Satan-worshipper, whatever cross-dresser you think might be immoral, if that's against your religious belief, you are going to be forced to abandon your religious beliefs, and we've been seeing that with some of the requirements under Obamacare."

Gohmert, a Republican, has a history of over-the-top antigay statements. In the House of Representatives in 2009, he said LGBT-inclusive federal hate-crimes law would offer antibias protections to people who are "oriented toward animals" or "toward corpses, toward children."

Tea Party Unity has posted audio files of other conference calls with right-wing stalwarts such as Gary Bauer and the National Organization for Marriage's Brian Brown, with the latter saying the argument against marriage equality is actually libertarian. "We're not arguing that the state create marriage, the state does not create marriage, but the state has to recognize the truth that marriage is by its nature the union of a man and a woman," Brown said. "When it abandons that truth, you're giving the power to the state to call black white and white black, to put a falsehood into the law and a state that can do that is a state that pretty much can do anything."