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'Nice guy' Mike Johnson really really hates LGBTQ+ Americans. Like, really [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-10-27  

One of the key reasons Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana finally lined up the Republican votes to become House speaker after other nominees failed was because everyone in the conference thinks he's "a nice guy," as NPR reporter Eric McDaniel noted several times Thursday on “Morning Edition.”

But Johnson isn't just aw-shucks nice: He's a particular brand of evangelical nice that frowns on LGBTQ+ Americans as lesser beings undeserving of equal protections under the Constitution. In other words, queer Americans should be treated as second-class citizens through and through. As antiquated as that point of view might seem to most Americans, it's the type of Christian conceit that still qualifies as "nice"—even ideal—in the Republican Party.

And where queer-hating Christians are concerned, Mike Johnson is top-notch. He cut his teeth as a legal advocate working for the anti-gay hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund. In the early aughts, ADF took the lead on mounting a legal battle against the freedom of same-sex couples to marry. Johnson memorialized all his truly heinous arguments and beliefs in a 2003 op-ed decrying the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision extending the right to privacy to persons engaging in gay sex. In other words, what you do in your bedroom is your business—a concept most Americans agree with.

But at the time of the ruling, Johnson sounded this warning about the justices: "By closing these bedroom doors, they have opened a Pandora's box."

Within the op-ed, Johnson argued that states have public health reasons for proscribing same-sex relations, but the entire piece was undergirded by the moral superiority of heterosexuals.

"States have always maintained the right to discourage the evils of sexual conduct outside marriage, and the state is right to discriminate between heterosexual and homosexual conduct since the latter cannot occur within the confines of marriage," Johnson wrote.

For Johnson, gay sex was evil and immoral because same-sex couples couldn't legally marry, nor should they ever be able to.

But let's forget marriage equality for a second: Johnson really, really wanted gay sex to remain criminalized.

"There is clearly no 'right to sodomy' in the Constitution, and the right of 'privacy of the home' has never placed all activity within the home outside the bounds of the criminal law," Johnson argued.

The Lawrence decision, Johnson continued, "is ultimately a strategic first shot for the homosexual lobby's ultimate prize—the redefinition of the marriage.”

Welp, he's got us there. It's true that not being thrown in the clink for having sex was the first step on the road to LGBTQ+ Americans seeking access to all the rights and privileges afforded to heterosexual couples through the institution of marriage.

The evolution of those freedoms took a fraught decade-plus to secure, but America has had this conversation concerning the right of same-sex couples to marry. And no, that right didn't lead to people marrying their pets, as Johnson claimed it could in a 2004 op-ed touting the "historic opportunity" Louisiana voters had to ban gay marriage at the ballot box.

This summer, Gallup's latest tracking poll found that 71% of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal.

But for Johnson, it was never really about the rights or benefits of marriage—the real evil was the fact that "same-sex, live-in lovers," as he called same-sex couples, wanted their "lifestyle made legitimate."

Here's a 2005 C-SPAN clip of Johnson explaining that concept in all its Christian glory, courtesy of HuffPost reporter Jennifer Bendery.

x Here is a clip of Mike Johnson condemning "same-sex live-in lovers" for wanting legal protections.https://t.co/vzYhf3rRqi — Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) October 26, 2023

Isn't that nice, in the sense of Christians reigning supreme and everyone else just being here for them to claim moral superiority over?

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