Republicans in the House of Representatives finally settled on a Speaker last week: Mike Johnson (R-LA), a fourth-term back-bencher who is so unknown that even his closest friends weren't aware he was in Congress.
Well, not that unknown.
He is a right-wing theocrat who believes that the wall between Church and State has a one-way gate through which his church gets to pass through at will and write all the laws for the rest of us. Before election to Congress, he was senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, where he wrote an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas supporting the state's laws criminalizing homosexuality. There he also defended Louisiana Amendment 1, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman within the Louisiana Constitution.
He was founder and chief legal council of Freedom Guard, a nonprofit legal ministry designed to represent Christian clients such as the Ark Encounter Theme Park, which sued the state of Kentucky when the state withdrew tax breaks worth millions of dollars previously granted the park because it required employees to pledge belief in "Young Earth" creationism.
In a sermon Johnson delivered at his church, he blamed mass shootings on, among other things, the teaching of evolution in public schools: "People say, 'How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?' Because we've taught a whole generation—a couple generations now—of Americans, that there's no right or wrong, that it's about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime."
He spread the lie that the family of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez owned the company that made voting machines used in the election. Dominion Voting Systems, founded in Canada and now owned by a New York private equity firm, won a $787.5 million judgment against Fox News this year for reporting that lie as fact.
He was one of 37 Republicans who vowed on the morning of January 6, 2021 to "vote to sustain objections to slates of electors submitted by states we believe clearly violated the Constitution in the presidential election of 2020." When Congress reconvened after the January 6 insurrection, Johnson, and most of his GOP colleagues, voted against certifying the results from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Perhaps it was Mike Johnson's terror over the fact of marriage equality that caused him and his cohorts to vote in favor of overthrowing the results of the 2020 presidential election. If so, okay, then homosexuality actually did "place our entire democratic system in jeopardy."
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