House Fire
Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has some of Congress's most retrograde views on mothers and family.
After weeks of Republican back-biting, GOP lawmakers finally ended their congressional leadership crisis on Wednesday by electing Rep. Mike Johnson as House speaker.
Johnson, a formerly obscure Louisiana representative, lacks the notoriety of other speaker candidates (see Rep. Steve Scalise, who previously spoke at a racist conference, or Rep. Jim Jordan, who has been accused of covering up widespread sexual abuse of the athletes he once coached). But where Johnson lacks a career-defining scandal, he outstrips his colleagues in having some of the most retrograde views on family of any sitting congress member.
Johnson is an opponent of no-fault divorce laws, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and LBGTQ+ existence. He’s blamed mass shootings on children learning about evolution, worked as an attorney for an anti-LGBTQ+ group, and pushed a bill that would ban abortions nationwide at approximately six weeks.
Johnson has spent most of his career not as a politician but as attorney and advocate for groups on the religious right.
While still a law student, Mother Jones reports, Johnson became involved in Christian-right policymaking by volunteering with the group Louisiana Family Forum. The LFF, which describes its mission as promoting “biblical principles” was a major backer of Louisiana’s “covenant marriage” law. The law (which an LFF founder and Louisiana lawmaker defended in a paper that began by slamming education about evolution) makes it harder for couples to separate.
Unlike a standard marriage that allows for no-fault divorce, Louisiana’s covenant marriages only allow a pair to divorce if a member can prove the other engaged in abuse or adultery, or has been convicted of a felony. (Couples that can prove they’ve lived separately for two years can also divorce under Louisiana’s covenant law.)
The status makes it harder for women (the majority of divorce petitioners) to escape bad marriages, and risks trapping abuse victims, especially when a couple has children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Louisiana is one of only three states that allow covenant marriages, and only one percent of Louisiana marriages between 2000 and 2010 were covenant marriages.
Johnson and his wife are one of the state’s few covenant couples. In 2005, the pair appeared on Good Morning America in a bid to popularize the policy. During the Good Morning America appearance, Johnson argued that divorce was “traumatic” for families (nevermind the trauma of forced marriage), while his wife wrote-off conventional marriages (which are virtually all of them) as “marriage light” and cautioned that it was a “pretty big red flag” if one’s fiance wasn’t down for a covenant marriage.
And Johnson was even less accommodating of gay marriage.
In 2003, while acting as an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund (an early moniker of the right-wing legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom), Johnson filed an amicus brief arguing against the overturn of sodomy laws, which criminalized gay sex. He doubled down on the position in a newspaper op-ed that year, comparing “same-sex deviate sexual intercourse” to “drugs, prostitution and counterfeiting,” and decrying “the evils of sexual conduct outside marriage.”
In court and in newspaper pages during this period, Johnson also fought against nondiscrimination policies that would prohibit exclusion of LGBTQ+ people.
“Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do,” Johnson wrote in a 2005 op-ed. “This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices [...] We must always remember that it is not bigotry to make moral distinctions.”
Johnson’s work for the religious right saw him fight on behalf of a Kentucky creationist museum that had lost some of its tourism tax benefits, after it required employees to sign a statement declaring that they held Young Earth creationist beliefs.
The following year, he would cite evolution education as a contributor to school shootings, during a speech in which he also attacked no-fault divorce and abortion rights.
“People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’” Johnson said during the speech at a Christian center. “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. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”
By that time, Johnson had entered electoral politics outright.
As a politician, Johnson’s career is short. In 2015, he was the only candidate to bid for the seat of an outgoing Louisiana state representative, who was leaving his post mid-term. Johnson took office without an election. While serving as a state lawmaker, Johnson proposed a bill that would have enabled discrimination against gay couples, under the guise of protecting religious liberties. The bill never made it to a vote, and by 2016, Johnson had moved on toward national politics, announcing his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives.
While in the House, Johnson has promoted some of the most extreme legislation against LBGTQ+ and reproductive rights. He co-sponsored a bill that would ban abortion nationally around six weeks of pregnancy, at which point many people are unaware of, or have only just learned of their pregnancy. He also sponsored bills to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding and to legally define life as beginning at conception.
And after a GOP-led campaign overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, Johnson was among a pack of Republicans who attempted to rebrand their unpopular assault on reproductive rights as beneficial to women—part of a “pro-mother” marketing campaign that has emerged on the anti-abortion right.
“Republicans push pro-family, pro-mother policies in wake of Dobbs ruling,” read a Fox News headline. Johnson’s “pro-family, pro-mother policy” that led the story was a bill that would allow pregnant women to apply for child support from the would-be fathers of their children. The bill, which would have offered a path toward some minor financial support, none of it publicly funded, was likely part of a backdoor push to inscribe “fetal personhood” into law, reproductive rights watchdogs warned.
Johnson has also introduced a version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation at a national level. His 2022 bill, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act'' draws on his decades-long history of conflating LGBTQ+ life with perversion. The bill would censor schools and libraries by prohibiting federal funding for any program that exposes children younger than 10 to “sexually oriented material,” which includes not only depictions of sexual activity but also “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.”
Such bills have been used at the state level to restrict access to books about LGBTQ+ characters, censor queer teachers, and ban symbols like Pride flags in schools. And for all their language about “protecting” elementary school children from age-inappropriate content, these new anti-gay gag laws are already seeing expansion efforts onto older students. Florida’s version of the law, which initially applied to children in kindergarten through third grade, was expanded in May, a year after its passage, to include new restrictions for students through 12th grade. An Alabama lawmaker signaled his intent this month to expand his own state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law through eighth grade.
If all of this—the gag orders, the abortion bans, the creationism and the covenant marriages—sounds like a return to a darker past, it’s a past that Johnson champions.
While giving a speech to an anti-choice group in 2013, Johnson mocked his detractors, whom he described as saying “‘Oh, you bigot. Can’t you be a little more open-minded? Come on, that’s so like 18th-century, you know?’”
“Well,” Johnson countered the imagined argument, “[the country’s founders] told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today.”
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! If you’re into this newsletter, feel free to forward it to a friend! In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been reading this week.
-The New York Times has a critical dispatch from a pediatrician and father of six children in northern Gaza.
“We are treating our patients to the best of our ability with the bare minimum of electricity, medicine and supplies,” writes Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, whose home has been destroyed in an air strike. “We sterilize wounds with vinegar, previously unthinkable in our modern intensive care unit. Drinking water ran out days ago, and the water we do have isn’t potable, contributing to a rising tide of intestinal infections and diseases not seen in Gaza in years. Our morgue filled to capacity within the first week and we’ve had to store many dead children in a nearby tent, praying that the decomposing bodies don’t contaminate the water wells or spread further disease. We fear an outbreak of cholera and typhoid. We fear for the long-term mental health impacts on the children in our care. Their little bodies are quick to injure and quick to heal, but their minds and spirits will need a lifetime of care to overcome what they have seen and experienced.”
-A billionaire hedge-funder has quietly funded some of the loudest anti-transgender advocates across the country, according to a new HuffPost report.
-Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters has become a national figure in education culture wars, speaking at this summer’s Moms for Liberty summit and supporting legislation that restricts discussion of race and gender. He is also, per a recent employee, really awful to work for. Here’s a resignation letter from one of several employees to quit during Walters’ tenure.
“Superintendent Walters, your absence, and the refusal to meet with your staff sends a concerning message that we may not hold value in your eyes,” writes a grant manager at the Oklahoma State Department of Education. She had 32 years experience in education, and quit the state grant-writing gig after four months, Tulsa World reports. “I hope that this can be attributed to inexperience rather than a personal political agenda as this would not be in the best interest of Oklahoma’s children, teachers, and dedicated OSDE employees. If your physical presence is not required for leadership, then the question arises as to why the position exists with a salary attached to it.”