People have been digging into the history of this man who, before he was in Congress, worked for anti-LGBTQ+ hate cells like the Family Research Council and what’s now called the Alliance Defending Freedom (it used to be Alliance Defense Fund), the group that’s currently employing Josh Hawley’s wife to overturn the FDA’s longstanding approval on the extremely safe and popular abortion drug Mifepristone.

Obviously he’s a severe white anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-abortion bigot, who wants a national abortion ban and introduced a national Don’t Say Gay bill. [ ]

In 2003, Johnson fought hard for the continued criminalization of gay sex, just as the Supreme Court decriminalized it with Lawrence v. Texas. While working as a lawyer for Alliance Defense Fund, which filed an amicus in the case, he argued in an op-ed for the Shreveport Times that “[s]tates have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He prudishly sneered for the sake of states’ rights to “discourage the evils of sexual conduct outside marriage” — what a goddamned dork — and posited that since you couldn’t then have gay sex within a marriage, then “the state is right to discriminate.” [ ]

But y’all might be particularly interested in Johnson’s advocacy for the weird, creepy, patriarchal and abusive practice of so-called “Covenant Marriage.” Conservative Christian extremists love it because it makes divorce really hard. Like, not even if you both just agree you want to get a divorce. Legum explains:

In Louisiana, for example – the first state to formally recognize covenant marriages – couples seeking a divorce “must go through marriage counseling,” submit evidence, and “be separated for at least a year before a divorce can be granted.” These requirements apply even in cases involving physical and sexual abuse, and increase the chance that a woman continues to experience violence at their hands of their partner.

Even in cases of physical and sexual abuse.

See why conservative Christians love it?

But don’t worry, y’all: Mike Johnson isn’t just the president of covenant marriages. He’s also a client!

Johnson and his wife entered into a covenant marriage in Louisiana in 1999. They’re now “proponents of the cause.” In an interview with ABC in 2005, Johnson said that opting for a covenant marriage was "kind of a no-brainer." 

They want the answer to "Why are women getting paid less than men?" to be "Because women don't work as hard as men do." They want the answer to "Why are all of this company's executives white men?" to be "Because they were all the best person for the job." They want "Why is this population disproportionately impoverished compared to other groups?" to be "Because they don't work as hard." Or, if they are big fans of Charles Murray, "Because their IQs are lower." They don't want people looking at groups of people and saying, "Hey, why is this group doing okay and this other group isn't?" if the answer is going to be anything like "Because the group that is doing okay had an advantage going in," they don't want to hear it.

Ironically, as much as they have ever-so-helpfully "culturally appropriated" the term, the thing they are mad at is still right there in the original definition. Ultimately the thing they are mad about, the thing that really gets under their skin, is people being aware of systemic injustices and working to correct them — largely because they are the ones who benefit from those systemic injustices.

The only "goal" the Right has put forth in recent years is that they want to stop other people from existing or force them to exist in a way they find more palatable. They want people to stop calling them racist when they say racist things on social media, they want us to stop being so popular on social media so that they can be popular on social media, they want people to stop saying what their pronouns are, they want store clerks to wish them a Merry Christmas, they want LGBTQ people to stop existing, they want Black people to stop complaining about police brutality, they want feminists to stop dying their hair blue and being feminists and to get back in the kitchen and make them a sandwich.