As Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA) is dangerously close to being in the White House, and maybe even more dangerous in his new position. So, what's my problem with the man?
As a lawyer, he has worked for reversing Lawrence v. Texas (a decision that keeps the government out of your bedroom); supported sodomy laws (that would put the government in your bedroom to make sure you're not a homosexual); and defended the Ark Encounter theme park when they lost tax breaks because they made belief in Young Earth creationism a condition for employment.
The organization he founded was called Freedom Guard, but you can see from his legal work that his definition of freedom is quite narrow, and actually makes people less free.
He voted to overturn the 2020 election results, and against a national commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. So much for supporting free elections and the Constitution.
He was Donald Trump's choice for Speaker.
His remarks on becoming Speaker included: "I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority." A belief in being ordained by God might lead a politician to think that anything he happens to want to do is OK, because God told them to.
He believed, and repeated, Trump's cockamamie conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines were rigged, and that they came from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. Never mind that Hugo Chavez had been dead since 2013.
He supports a national abortion ban. A fetus has more rights than the woman carrying it.
He is on the same page as Trump on the subject of windmills: living too near a wind turbine could cause "depression and cognitive dysfunction." Notice the use of scientific-sounding words by a person who is against science. He gets lots of donations from the oil and gas industry in return.
He has added the teaching of evolution to the long list of causes for school shootings, a long list that does not include easy access to guns.
He favors the reintroduction of prayer in public schools.
His beliefs on church and state separation have been influenced by pseudo-historian David Barton. He has said that the "word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth," and claims that the United States is the only nation founded upon a "religious statement of faith." Which is untrue in two ways: first, there are surely many countries in history (and currently) that were founded on religious grounds; second, the United States is not one of them. Indeed, Mr. Johnson's freedom to worship as an evangelical is a direct consequence of the Constitution's not mentioning Christianity as a founding principle. The evangelicals of the time, fearing persecution by the Anglicans of Virginia and the Puritans of Massachusetts, voted with the Deists to not establish any religion as the official one.
Read this and remember: The only guarantee of religious freedom is the separation of church and state.
Christian nationalism is a killer of freedom, and a suffocator of scientific understanding. There are way too many Christian nationalists in government, and Mike Johnson is too near the top.
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