11 months ago
53
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."
