Questioned about comments and actions deemed by many to be homophobic, the new Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, told Fox News his worldview was: “Go pick up a Bible.”
Speaking on Thursday, Johnson said he “genuinely love[d] all people regardless of their lifestyle choices.
“This is not about the people themselves. I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘… People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe and so I make no apologies for it.”
Johnson added: “That’s my personal worldview.”
Johnson’s rise to the speakership was confirmed on Wednesday, as the fourth candidate since Kevin McCarthy was ejected by the actions of a clutch of far-right representatives in his own congressional conference earlier this month.
The Louisianan, 51, won his final vote without Republican dissent but is a controversial pick nonetheless. Before entering Congress in 2016, he was an attorney for rightwing Christian groups and a state legislator. In both roles he advanced extreme views, particularly against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Johnson’s work for the Alliance Defending Freedom has attracted widespread attention. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors far-right activity, calls the ADF a hate group – a label it rejects.
Nonetheless, the SPLC says the ADF has “supported the recriminalisation of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults in the US and criminalisation abroad; defended state-sanctioned sterilisation of trans people abroad; contended that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to engage in paedophilia; and claimed that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society”.
Johnson’s host for Thursday’s interview, Sean Hannity, said: “Comments you made both in writing and advocacy for this group about homosexuality, calling it sinful, destructive and not supporting gay marriage, quote, ‘No clear right to sodomy in the constitution.’ You have been getting hammered on this and I … wanna know … where you stand.”
Johnson said: “I don’t even remember some of them. I was a litigator called upon to defend the state marriage amendments.
“If you remember back in the early 2000s, I think there [were] over 35 states … that the people went to the ballot in their respective states and they amended their state constitutions to say marriage is one man and one woman. Well, I was a religious liberty defense and was called to defend those cases in the courts.”
Earlier, CNN unearthed editorials for a newspaper in Shreveport, Louisiana, in which Johnson said homosexuality was “inherently unnatural”, would lead to legalised paedophilia and could destroy “the entire democratic system”.
“Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural,” Johnson wrote in 2004, “and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.”
Legalising gay marriage, he said, meant “we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, paedophiles and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”
Johnson also called same-sex marriage, which would be made legal across the US in 2015, “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic”.
Joe Biden in December 2022 signed into law landmark bipartisan legislation protecting same-sex marriages in the US amid a conservative backlash over gender issues and alarming incidents of violence against the LGBTQ+ community. The US president hailed it as a step toward building a nation where “decency, dignity and love are recognized, honored and protected”.
Meanwhile, CNN also surfaced an ADF amicus brief from 2003, in Lawrence v Texas, the landmark case which saw the supreme court strike down bans on gay sex.
Johnson said authorities had “legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate intercourse”.
“In closing these bedroom doors,” he wrote, “they have opened a Pandora’s box.”
