Speaker Mike Johnson’s early ties to the extreme anti-LGBTQ right are being uncovered after his quick and surprising election to lead the Republican House of Representatives last week.
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski’s investigatory unit, KFile, on Wednesday uncovered Johnson’s remarks in support of so-called “ex-gay” conversion therapy, which major medical institutions and government agencies have pronounced dangerous, possibly deadly, and likened to or defined as torture.
Johnson had collaborated with an “ex-gay” ministry and his employer before he entered politics in the mid-2000’s, a Christian legal organization that is now designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.
Wednesday evening, as Mediate reported, CNN played audio of Johnson talking about an annual event he worked on with his employer, the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom) and Exodus International, a now-defunct and debunked “ex-gay” organization that claimed gay people could become heterosexual through conversion therapy.
That event was targeted toward school children.
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“Our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and cannot change. But what these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do. It’s not something that you are,” Johnson said in the CNN audio (below).
Kaczynski also told host Eric Burnett, “homosexuality was a very — it was a topic he talked about a lot. When that Lawrence v. Texas ruling came down in 2003, which threw out state sodomy laws, Johnson actually wrote to say that he thought those laws should have stayed in place.”
“He called homosexuality, we reported last week, inherently unnatural. He called it a dangerous lifestyle. He was very against the same sex marriage, and he actually said it was going to bring down democracy, and then he said people would be marrying their pets, goldfish, cats, things like that, and even shared this sort of odd pseudo-scientific or historical theory that the Roman empire fell —” Kaczynski said, before Burnett interjected with “Because of homosexuality?”
In the next clip they played, Johnson says: “Many historians, those who are objective, would look back and recognize, and give some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society.”
Watch below or at this link.