By now you’ve likely heard that Representative Mike Johnson—the congressman Republicans finally elected as the new Speaker of the House after 22 days of chaos—played a significant role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election, a lowlight on his résumé that is obviously deeply concerning for the future of democracy. Also extremely worrisome? Johnson’s wildly bigoted remarks about homosexuality over the years, and the fact that he supported criminalizing gay sex between consenting adults.
CNN’s KFile reports that prior to his career in politics, Johnson wrote a series of deeply homophobic editorials in his role as an attorney for the socially conservative legal group now known as Alliance Defending Freedom.
IDK about anyone else here, but when I see anodyne-sounding-but-doublespeak org names like ‘Alliance Defending Freedom’, it’s a red flag.
ADF has never defended freedom, unless by ‘freedom’ you mean the ability to discriminate against LGBT folk and women. They proclaim themselves to be for “the right of people to freely live out their faith” but really that only seems to cover folks whose faith is some flavor of political bigotry.
Yeah so when Johnson remarked that “God has ordained each of us” to congress, the flavor of God he’s talking about is the one that wants laws to protect anti-LGBT bullies and vigilantes, not their victims. Meanwhile everyone else whose faith does not abet that shit now gets to hear him claim to speak hate on God’s behalf
Also in case you forgot, the history of sentencing people to ‘hard labor’ derives from the post-civil-war practice of convicting black men in kangaroo courts (after all, the 13th Amendment allowed for slavery if it was punishment for a crime). When they were told they couldn’t keep slaves but they could enslave people if they were convicts, the notion of ‘convict leasing’ was born.