Let's laugh at something a congressman recently said about gay marriage, yes? Because Rep. Steve King, a notable jackass, has a theory: Under legalized gay marriage, children would be raised collectively in "warehouses," a la Ancient Sparta, effectively ending civilization.

Don't you just love it when they get on a roll like this? Certain Republicans are so poetic when they're snowballing isolated social issues into national existential emergencies. Iowa's Steve King is one of those Republicans:

"I think that if we can't defend marriage, that it becomes very hard to defend life," King said. "Marriage is the crucible by which we pour all of our values and pass them on to our children, and that is how the culture is renewed each time. So, if we lose marriage - for instance, if our children are raised in warehouses, so to speak. There have been civilizations that have tried to do that. The Spartans did that. They took the children away and taught them to be warriors. It's a good way to defend a country, but not much of a way to run a civilization.

"So, I'm afraid if that happened - if we lose the marriage, we lose the home, we lose the nuclear family then we can't teach our values. We won't be able to teach our faith. We won't be able to teach life. We won't be able to teach our Constitutional values either. That's why I'm afraid it's going to be very, very difficult to defend life."

No values, no families. Sociopathic war warehouses of armed children. The shredding of the Constitution. Life, the very concept of it, in its entirety, becoming indefensible. This is why some adults of the same sex must be stopped, by any means necessary, from signing courthouse certificates granting them joint tax benefits.

[via Jon Chait; photo via AP]