DAILY TRIFECTA + 1: Meet Speaker Johnson
He's ordained!
TITLE: Mike Johnson's Satanic panic: How evangelical delusions trained Republicans to love Trump's lies
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/31/mike-johnsons-satanic-panic-evangelical-delusions-trained-the-christian-right-to-love-lies/
EXCERPT: "Devilish Danny DeVito Cartoon Sparks GOP Satanic Panic," read a Daily Beast headline in September of last year. "Disney and FX have decided to embrace and market what is clearly evil," Johnson said of a series called "Little Demon," which, ironically, is a comedy show about how the devil's daughter has declined to become the Antichrist. Johnson describes sprinting to change the channel from the trailer, lest the tendrils of hell emanating from this show, which also stars Aubrey Plaza, somehow snag his children.
Despite being roundly mocked on social media for these hysterics, he doubled down on his podcast, insisting, "This is not frivolous, light-hearted entertainment," but "serious, eternal business." Yes, he argued people are literally going to hell for laughing at Danny DeVito playing a satirical version of the Prince of Darkness.
This is, after all, the same politician who once fought to secure taxpayer funding for a Noah's Ark-based theme park. Yes, he did so out of conviction that a literal flood wiped out all life on Earth except an old man, his family and a boatful of animals around 2300 B.C. Never mind that there are historical records of thriving, well-documented civilizations like Mesopotamia and Egypt at the time, and they did not disappear into a flood. The Noah exhibit even claimed dinosaurs were on the boat, which did not stop Johnson from arguing that "what we read in the Bible are actual historical events."
"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour,” Johnson wrote on Facebook, quoting the Bible to justify his belief that a cartoon show is literally demon-possessed.
I was reminded of a quote from Carl Sagan's classic defense of science, "The Demon-Haunted World": "The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes—from incest, slavery, and mass murder to the most refined love, courage, and self-sacrifice."
TITLE: New House Speaker Mike Johnson Holds Extreme Views on Climate Change and Science
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/new-house-speaker-mike-johnson-holds-extreme-views-climate-change-and-science
EXCERPT: Jackson Voss, a Louisiana native and former policy advocate in DC, encountered Johnson’s staff during his time as a legislative staffer. Voss, now a policy coordinator at the Alliance for Affordable Energy, described Johnson’s views “as being anti-science” on issues ranging from climate change to reproductive and mental health. Voss also echoed Delgado’s impression of Johnson, that his positions are influenced less by politics than by a deep conviction in Christian fundamentalism. “His convictions are extreme,” said Voss, “but they’re sincerely held.”
Johnson, who has advocated for public schools to teach the Bible as an “accurate record of history,” is opposed to reproductive rights and LGBTQIA equality. While serving as a state legislator, he received a $400,000 contract to defend the state law he helped pass, which restricted abortion access. He has also written in favor of criminalizing gay sex.
According to Johnson’s previous campaign disclosure filings, he has been a board member of Freedom Guard, Inc—a nonprofit “contending for the Christian faith through legislation”—as well as Living Waters Publications, which offers “Biblical Evangelism training camps.” In 2018, he received between $25,000 and $100,000 for “private pastoral counseling services” from his wife’s company. He was previously board president of Providence Classical Academy, which offers an education “founded upon a Biblical worldview,” including creationism. The academy’s website states, “in contrast to modern education, we use old (proven) methods of reading old (influential) books.”
Louisianans who spoke to Sierra said it’s very likely that Johnson was able to claim the speaker’s gavel because, unlike the equally extreme but more pugnacious Jim Jordan of Ohio, he is so consistently nice and polite.
Voss recalls encountering Johnson’s equally polite staff, but said he believes the politeness is “very strategic,” as it puts a palatable face on extreme views. Voss said he has “a feeling that many of his [Johnson’s] colleagues are not actually very familiar with his positions. Otherwise, I have a feeling they would have hesitated to make him Speaker of the House.”
Justin Solet, a long-time environmental justice organizer from Louisiana, likewise expressed concern that Johnson is putting “a polite face on a terrifying aspect” of the Republican platform. “It’s frightening to see,” he added.
Solet described Johnson as “a zealot” and says if Johnson’s vision were realized in Louisiana, “we would turn into Gilead,” a reference to the fascist ethnostate in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
TITLE: How Mike Johnson’s “Covenant Marriage” Helps Explain His Politics
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/mike-johnson-republican-house-speaker-covenant-marriage.html
EXCERPT: In May of 1999, Johnson, who was then a couple of weeks away from graduating law school, married his wife, Kelly, a schoolteacher whom he met at a wedding. Almost two years later, a photo of the smiling couple ran with an Associated Press story, under the headline “Can states successfully legislate marital bliss?”
The story explained that Mike and Kelly had entered a “covenant marriage.” This meant that, prior to marrying, they had to undergo premarital counseling and sign a binding contract agreeing that they would divorce only in the case of abuse, abandonment, imprisonment of a spouse, or lengthy separation. A covenant couple, no matter how miserable, cannot simply decide to divorce.
“In my generation, all we’ve ever known is the no-fault scheme, and any deviation from that seems like a radical move,” the then-28-year-old Johnson said of divorce. “Because so few people have chosen covenant marriage in Louisiana, it seems like an unpopular choice. It’s not unpopular. It’s just unknown. Once the message is out there, a whole lot more people will choose it.”
But Johnson’s prediction proved incorrect. In 1997, when Louisiana adopted the option of covenant marriage, it was heralded as the start of a movement: It was the first time that divorce laws in America were moving to become more stringent, not less. A number of Southern states debated their own versions of the law. But it received pushback from domestic violence survivors (even if you filed on the basis of abuse, you still had to go through court-mandated counseling beforehand), Catholics (counseling mentioned the possibility of divorce, which the church opposes), and even faithful evangelicals (a “more serious” marriage implied that their “regular” marriages weren’t serious or religiously founded).
Ultimately, only two other states—Arizona in 1998 and Arkansas in 2001—followed suit. And very few couples—around 1 or 2 percent—in the three states opted for this type of commitment.
Johnson, though, continued to push his rosy version of it. He told the AP he was trying to persuade all of his friends to convert their marriages. According to NOLA.com, the Johnsons became “the poster couple” for covenant marriage. Just a few months after the AP article, Mike and Kelly were on Good Morning America, talking to Diane Sawyer about being among the few such couples in the country. When Sawyer asked Kelly about her decision, Kelly, charming and smiling, made the idea seem romantic.
“Oh, gosh, I would have to say, from a woman’s perspective, I’ve been in some bad relationships before, and I just knew that when I met the man I was supposed to marry, that I wanted to know it was for a lifetime,” she said. Later, she added: “It’s a big red flag for a woman if you decide you want the option of the covenant marriage, and your mate says, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ ”
At the time, the Johnsons seemed like a nice, media-friendly couple. But Mike Johnson wasn’t just a traditional-minded groom; he was on a political mission. He had been a volunteer with a group called the Louisiana Family Forum, which worked with all three branches of government in the state to push socially conservative laws. The lawmaker to first introduce the idea of covenant marriage was Tony Perkins, who is now known as the president of the influential Family Research Council but who was then a state representative. According to NOLA.com, Johnson helped Perkins craft the covenant marriage bill.
So the happy young couple’s public appearance, however genuine, was also politically useful. And in his handling of Sawyer’s questions, there were hints that Mike Johnson had more than a simple romantic sense of the commitment.
Sawyer: The ACLU has said you’re letting the state legislate what is really a religious or a personal commitment.
Johnson: That’s true, but I’m not sure why they oppose it. Because society has a vested interest in preserving marriages because of all the social ills that come from the root cause of divorce. The law, the state, is going to sanction some kind of marriage. So why not have an option that’s more binding?
His—and his wife’s—talking points clearly reflected the moment’s political language. Covenant marriage emerged from a broader conservative “marriage movement” in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when some Southern lawmakers fixated on the idea of divorce as a cause of society’s ills. (Oddly, divorce rates were on the decline at the time.) Politicians such as Mike Huckabee and groups such as James Dobson’s Family Research Council (Perkins didn’t become its president until 2003) pushed marriage promotion as an urgent political matter. In state legislatures, Christian conservatives rallied around the cause of saving marriages. Some began to propose discussions at the high school level about teaching healthy communication in relationships, for example, while others pushed to provide public funding for marital counseling.
“Basically, covenant marriage was a distillation of a variety of things that people wanted to put together in policy to strengthen marriage,” Laura Sanchez, a Bowling Green State University professor, said. “It was a diverse conversation.”
In the case of Louisiana, an LSU professor named Katherine Spaht felt a calling from God to protect children from fractured homes and brought the general idea of covenant marriage to Perkins, who drew up the law based on his religious understanding of divorce. In 1999 Perkins wrote with excitement of what Louisiana’s law could mean for the future. The family values movement, he asserted, had become too characterized by empty rhetoric and too strongly associated with what it opposed. Instead, the movement needed to identify what it meant to stand for:
This is what covenant marriage law represents. It is not a short-term approach that simply changes divorce law by repealing no-fault divorce. Rather, it is a long-term solution that fosters the development of a culture that embraces traditional family values. Creating such an environment is, in large part, up to the faith community, but government can foster its development by providing optional standards that recognize the value of family and the permanence of marriage.
The covenant marriage, in other words, seemed like a way to present something positive from the religious right. And requiring “counseling” allowed the practice to seem secular. “They’re using counseling to open the door to state-sponsored religious practice,” said Rebecca L. Davis, a University of Delaware professor and author of More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. “Counseling isn’t intrinsically religious. But these folks are seeing their version of marriage counseling as an extension of church life and faith.”
TITLE: Mike Johnson’s Wife Takes Down Website That Compared Being Gay To Bestiality, Incest
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-johnson-wife-website-homosexuality-bestiality-incest_n_653fd7a9e4b0ae2dc0b49d17
EXCERPT: HuffPost reported Friday that Kelly Johnson, the wife of the Louisiana Republican and newly elected speaker, is owner and CEO of Onward Christian Counseling Services, which promotes Bible-based pastoral counseling. Her website featured a link to its 2017 operating agreement, which lays out the company’s corporate bylaws ― and states that the business is grounded in the belief that sex is offensive to God if it is not between a man and a woman married to each other.
It specifically puts gay, bisexual and transgender people in the same category as people who have sex with animals or family members, citing all of them as examples of “sexual immorality.”
“We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,” reads a passage from the eight-page business document.
This document also refers to “pre-born babies” and says that Onward Christian Counseling Services is committed to protecting all human life, “from conception through natural death.”
The website was live on Friday but had been pulled down by Saturday afternoon, according to metadata captured by the Wayback Machine, a service that archives internet sites.