Before entering politics in 2015, Mike Johnson, now the Republican Speaker of the House, worked closely with a now-discredited and defunct “ex-gay” group that claimed people can change from gay to straight through Christianity, according to a CNN investigation.
Exodus International, a Christian ministry which alleged for decades that “Change Is Possible” through so-called “conversion therapy,” shut down in 2013 after its president confessed, “the majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them have not experienced a change in their orientation.”
Major medical groups have called “conversion therapy” harmful and dangerous. Medical and legal experts, and some who have experienced it have likened or labeled it torture. Last year CNN reported, “So-called conversion therapy causes serious emotional harm to LGBTQ people and can even be deadly, but it also comes with a high financial cost to individuals and to society as a whole, according to a new study.”
“I do not believe that cure is a word that is applicable to really any struggle, homosexuality included,” Exodus president Alan Chambers, “who is married to a woman and has children, but speaks openly about his own sexual attraction to men,” said in 2012, according to an NBC News report at the time. “For someone to put out a shingle and say, ‘I can cure homosexuality’ — that to me is as bizarre as someone saying they can cure any other common temptation or struggle that anyone faces on Planet Earth.”
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But as CNN’s KFile reports Wednesday, Mike Johnson “closely collaborated” with Exodus International “in the mid-to-late 2000s.”
“Johnson, a lawyer, gave legal advice to an organization called Exodus International and partnered with the group to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens, according to a CNN KFile review of more than a dozen of Johnson’s media appearances from that timespan.”
During that time Johnson was an attorney and spokesperson for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), now renamed the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal organization that appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
“He and his group collaborated with Exodus from 2006 to 2010,” CNN reports. “For years, Johnson and Exodus worked on an event started by ADF in 2005 known as the ‘Day of Truth’ – a counterprotest to the ‘Day of Silence,’ a day in schools in which students stayed silent to bring awareness to bullying faced by LGBTQ youth.”
In 2008, Johnson said, “Day of Truth was really established to counter the promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools.”
Calling being gay “dangerous,” Johnson “frequently disparaged homosexuality, according to KFile’s review. He advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and went so far as to partially blame it for the fall of the Roman Empire.”
“’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,’ Johnson told a radio host in 2008.”
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Johnson declared in 2008, “I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change.”
“Homosexual behavior is something you do, it’s not something that you are,” he also said.
Last year the White House announced, “Children who are exposed to so-called ‘conversion therapy’ face higher rates of attempted suicide and trauma,” and noted, “President Biden is using his executive authority to launch an initiative to protect children across America and crack down on this harmful practice, which every major medical association in the United States has condemned.”
CNN adds that “Videos put out by Exodus and ADF on their standalone Day of Truth website featured two Exodus staffers speaking about how teens didn’t need to ‘accept’ or ’embrace’ their homosexuality. The videos featured testimonials of a ‘former-homosexual’ and ‘former lesbian.'”
“Documents on the website were not archived online but were saved by anti-conversion therapy groups such as Truth Wins Out in 2007 and 2008,” CNN reports. “One video featured Johnson, who was later quoted in a press release on Exodus International’s website ahead of the event, saying, ‘An open, honest discussion allows truth to rise to the surface.'”
The ADF-Exodus event “directly harmed LGBTQ youth,” Wayne Besen, the executive director and founder of Truth Wins Out and an expert on the ex-gay industry, told CNN. Truth Wins Out is a nonprofit that “educates the world on the harm caused by destructive ‘ex-gay’ conversion programs, while fighting to eliminate anti-LGBTQ prejudice and discrimination.”
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“This is someone whose core was promoting anti-gay and ex-gay viewpoints. He wouldn’t pander to anti-gay advocates, he was the anti-gay and ex-gay advocate,” Besen also told CNN.
Besen told NCRM via email, “Mike Johnson is an extremist who is 100% all-in with ‘ex-gay’ conversion therapy. He personally promoted it and advocated it for vulnerable LGBTQ youth. He’s a dangerous demagogue and religious zealot of the worst kind.”
Besen also shared with NCRM his organization’s 2007 video that shows Mike Johnson talking about “truth” (at the 9 second mark).
Watch the video below or at this link.