Newly sworn-in Speaker Mike Johnson‘s record is being rapidly unearthed and critics are expressing anger and outrage that House Republicans have elevated what some are calling a far-right Christian nationalist to become the third most-powerful elected official in the country.
“While preaching a sermon in 2016,” MeidasTouch Network reports Thursday, “Johnson blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.”
During his sermon at the Christian Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said: “Some of you were around in the late 60s, you remember that what that was about? The counterculture revolution, Woodstock, and drugs and peace and free love and all that, but,” he claimed, it was “more about the undermining of the foundations of religion and morality.”
“Because if you remember in the late 60s we invented things like no-fault divorce laws. We invented the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973, where the state government sanctioned the killing of the unborn,” he said.
“All these things happened because as collectively as Americans, we began to get together in growing numbers and thumb our nose at the creator and say, ‘We don’t believe that anymore, we’re rejecting the founders natural law philosophy in favor of moral relativism, and we’re going down another path.’ ”
READ MORE: New GOP Speaker: Separation of Church and State Is Only a ‘Shield for People of Faith’
“Now, what we tolerate in moderation our children excuse in excess. What happens when you fast forward another 30 or 40 years?” he asked. “We know that we’re living in a completely amoral society. And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their school house and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we taught a whole generation, a couple of generations now, of Americans that there is no right and wrong. That it’s about survival of the fittest and you evolved from the primordial slime, why is that life of any sacred value because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed.”
“None of this should surprise us,” Johnson claimed.
Critics blamed the new House Speaker.
Chris Harris, vice president of communications for Giffords, the anti-gun violence group founded and led by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, responded by saying, “You know what doesn’t lead to gun deaths in schools? Teaching kids science. What does? Giving kids easy access to guns.”
The Atlantic’s Norman Ornstein responded with one word: “Lunatic.”
And The Daily Beast’s Goldie Taylor served up this response: “Speaker Froot Loops.”
Watch below or at this link.