Mike Johnson’s Failure as Speaker and Exposure as a Dangerous Bigoted Religious Extremist

‘America Rises’ Post #26: Saturday, December 9th, 2023

Mike Johnson was without a doubt the absolute worst person Republicans could have conceivably chosen for House Speaker. The only defense they could possibly have for this cosmic error in judgment was that they simply didn’t know enough about him. Well, maybe they should have vetted him before nominating and unanimously voting for him. If they had, they would likely have recognized that not only is Johnson completely unqualified and unfit to be Speaker, he is a political nightmare for the GOP and a gift that never stops giving to Democrats. The more we learn about “MAGA Mike,” the worse he makes the Republican Party look; the more he drives fundraising to new heights for Democrats; and the clearer it becomes that the Republican Party wholeheartedly endorses all of its worst and most extreme and anti-democratic positions.

Johnson is a hardcore MAGA, Trump-loving, election-denying/fascism-endorsing, abortion-ban supporting, gay-bashing, climate-change-denying, white-replacement-theory and conspiracy theory-promoting religious extremist. The main reason he was such a bad choice for Speaker is that he serves as a giant magnifying glass for every issue that the Republican Party is on the losing side of and which makes them vulnerable in 2024; from his denial of science to his opposition to same-sex marriage to his rejection of reproductive rights for women to his expansive (and the more we learn, potentially criminal) role in orchestrating the effort to attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the House of Representatives.

Regarding last year’s cataclysmic and unconstitutional Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Johnson said: “Many of us have been working towards this day our entire adult lives, and it is a joyous occasion. There is no right to abortion in the Constitution; there never was,” he declared and called abortion a “holocaust.” [Yes, it is truly a mystery how a document written by 55 men in 1787 somehow managed not to explicitly mention abortion rights. Also, the first sentence of the first Amendment literally states that “no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion.” Opposition to abortion is rooted in the religious belief that fetuses are humans, which they are not, and that the government should be able to make decisions about women’s bodies/reproductive choices over women themselves, which they most certainly should not].

On LGBTQ rights, Johnson is even more extreme, puritanical, and flat-out dangerous in his rhetoric. He has called same-sex marriages “counterfeit legal arrangements” pushed by “radical homosexual advocacy groups.” As a lawyer for a conservative religious organization, he went to court multiple times to defend Louisiana’s gay marriage ban. He has also called homosexuality “sinful and destructive” and said “homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” (Ok, Mike).

While he has shied away from some of these beliefs when asked about them in press interviews, such as stating “I don’t remember saying that,” he has repeatedly demonstrated that he continues to hold them fervently in private or in conversations with members of his own party. For example, last Sunday (December 3^rd), he sent out an email to his subscribers under the header of National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) “News Alert,” before stating: