Late last month, when House Republicans ended their chaotic, weeks-long search for a new speaker by elevating Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, a curious trend of stories began appearing in national media. Democratic operatives (and perhaps a few of Johnson’s Republican adversaries, too) had begun leaking what’s known in Washington as “oppo”, or opposition research – unflattering truths about political rivals – about the new speaker.
For many politicians, the embarrassing secrets revealed in an oppo dump are somewhat oblique; usually, they’re about money. Maybe the candidate, as a young lawyer, represented a bank in a case where he aimed to repossess the home of a poor widow; maybe the candidate’s husband or daughter was appointed to a job they did not seem quite qualified for, raising questions about nepotism or access trading. The aim of such stories is to make a politician appear corrupt, or unscrupulous – like someone beholden to greed and not to principle.
But the picture that has emerged instead of the once-obscure Louisiana congressmen has not been that of the typically cynical climber, maneuvering corporate heights in pursuit of their own ambition without regard to ethics. Instead, the revelations that have emerged about Mike Johnson since his ascent to the speakership paint a picture of a fevered zealot: in thrall of baroque and morbid religious fantasies; beholden to a regressive, bigoted and morbid worldview; and above all, obsessed – with a lurid and creepy enthusiasm – with sex, and how he thinks it should be done.
The enforcement of a Christian sexual morality and a strict gender hierarchy of men over women have not been incidental or minor themes of Johnson’s career: they have been its primary goal, one he pursued doggedly through his pre-congressional life. As a lawyer, he worked against gay marriage, and to uphold Louisiana’s criminal ban on gay sex, writing briefs that described homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and “a dangerous lifestyle” which he compared to pedophilia and bestiality. He still opposes marriage equality, and led efforts to squash the speakership candidacy of Tom Emmer last month in part because of Emmer’s support for gay marriage rights. Along the way, Johnson has authored a national version of Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill, which would outlaw mentions of homosexuality at schools, hospitals and other federally funded facilities. He opposes access to transition-related healthcare for adolescents and adults alike, and both he and his wife have worked to advance so-called “conversion therapy”, an abusive, homophobic practice that has been outlawed in several states.
It probably goes without saying that Johnson, like many Republicans and nearly all of the party’s luminaries, favors a national ban on abortion, which he calls a “holocaust.” While more savvy Republicans like Glenn Youngkin have attempted to frame themselves as “moderates” by placing their preferred abortion bans at supposedly more amenable points in pregnancy, like 15 weeks, Johnson has made no such effort: he has sponsored legislation that would ban abortion nationwide at all stages of pregnancy, establishing a “right to life” for fertilized eggs that supersedes women’s rights to dignity and self-determination.
His sweeping antagonism to abortion rights has extended to several kinds of birth control, such as IUDs, implants and many birth control pills. In his career as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom – a rightwing legal shop spearheading efforts to advance Christian gender conservatism through litigation – he argued that the most popular kinds of hormonal birth control, and those that are controlled by women, are equivalent to abortion and should therefore be banned. When the House advanced a bill to codify the right to contraception after the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022, Johnson voted against it. He has since played dumb on the issue, claiming he does not remember his opposition to birth control in an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News.
In light of his aggressively misogynist and anti-gay views on public policy, it is likely not surprising that Johnson also advances a disturbing and sexist view of the private sphere. He has condemned no-fault divorce, the liberalized regime of divorce law that was won by feminists in the 20th century, and which allowed women to initiate divorce and to exit marriages without having to prove either infidelity or abuse to a court. Johnson says that women’s freedom to leave marriages, along with their freedom to elect out of motherhood when they choose, is responsible for mass shootings.
He and his own wife have a so-called “covenant marriage”, a religious arrangement that formalizes men’s superiority and constricts women’s freedom to leave, designed for conservative straight couples who feel that no-fault divorce and gay marriage rights somehow degrade their own unions. He has also spoken of being in a bizarre arrangement of mutual masturbation monitoring with his son, with whom Johnson installed family surveillance technology that reports users’ pornography consumption habits to one another.
It would be easy to see Johnson’s wildly regressive gender politics as a personal quirk – his beliefs that gay people are sinful and inferior; that women should not be able to live freely from men or use their bodies in ways that are counter to wishes of the men close to them; that marriage should act, for men, as an entitlement to absolute control, and for women, as a prison. But these ideas are not quirks; they are part of a powerful constituency in the Republican party, one that has now found its way into the speakership, second in line for the presidency.
Gender conservatism does not tend to attract as much notice as the other pillars of the far-right ideology: it is less distinct than the far right’s avowed white supremacy, less flashy than its hostility to democracy. But the convictions shared by Johnson – about women’s inferiority and men’s right to control them, about gay people’s moral transgression, and about the ways that the sexed body at birth can, and must, be used to determine the outcomes of a person’s life – have become the foundation upon which the Republican party’s warring factions are set to unite.
The notion that the Christian right tradition that Johnson represents would be uncomfortable with Trumpism was always overstated; in America, Christian conservatives have always had more moral vanity than moral conviction. But now, Johnson’s ascent to the head of the thoroughly Trumpist House Republican caucus marks the groundbreaking for a new party order. The Republican party is rebuilding itself: it’s building on misogyny.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
