He’s now the new Republican Speaker of the House but a decade ago, attorney Mike Johnson worked to block a legally-married woman from adopting her wife’s biological child.
By 2014, Johnson had already built a history of working on causes embraced by the religious right, according to a new report by Accountable.US, which USA Today describes as a “progressive watchdog group.” That report details some of Johnson’s legal work with or for conservatives and the religious right, dating as far back as 2003, when Johnson worked in support of the now disgraced and twice-removed former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.
“Johnson represented anti-LGBTQ Focus On The Family in an amicus brief in support of far-right judge Roy Moore and a two-and a half ton Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama state judicial building,” according to Accountable.US.
Quoting the Journal of Civil Law Studies on Johnson representing “Louisiana as the state attempted to bar a mother from adopting her wife’s biological son,” Accountable.US explains:
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“In 2004, Chasity Brewer gave birth to a baby boy while living in California. At the time, Brewer was unmarried, and the child was conceived as a result of insemination by an anonymous sperm donor. In 2008, Brewer and her partner, Angela Costanza, were married in California, where same-sex marriages are permitted. By 2013, the couple came to live in Lafayette Parish in the state of Louisiana and in July 2013, Angela Costanza filed a petition for intrafamily adoption so that she may have parental rights to Brewer’s son.”
That adoption was granted weeks later, in late January 2014.
But according to records, Louisiana’s Attorney General intervened and asked the court to vacate the adoption ruling, citing law that he should have first been notified. An appeals court agreed.
Johnson was one of several attorneys who appear to have represented the State of Louisiana.
Later that same year Louisiana Judge Edward Rubin ruled the state’s law banning same-sex marriage violated the state constitution and ordered the couple’s marriage and adoption recognized.
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“Mike Johnson,” The Shreveport Times reported in September of 2014, “a Bossier attorney who is working on behalf of the state to help defend its marriage laws in both the federal and state cases now pending on appeal, says [Judge] Rubin’s ruling was a piece of advocacy, rather than an objective decision.”
Johnson wrote in an email that Judge Rubin “decreed that the idea of one man-one woman marriage — a definition that has endured throughout the history of civilization and was embraced by every American state until just the past few years — is ‘irrational.’”
“The district court far exceeded its jurisdiction,” Johnson also said. “The judicial branch is given the authority to interpret the law, but not make it.”
The newspaper report added: “As for Johnson, he believes fighting to preserve the traditional notion of marriage is relevant even as his opponents have seen victories all over the United States.”
“We do not believe same-sex marriage is inevitable,” Johnson told the paper in 2014. “We believe a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately agree that the definition of marriage is a matter reserved by the Constitution to the people of each state, to decided by broad social consensus.”
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Accountable.US also reports:
“2015: Mike Johnson defended Louisiana’s ban on allowing same-sex couples to jointly file state income taxes and to register two parents on birth certificates, until the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.”
“2014: Johnson represented Louisiana state officials in a Fifth Circuit challenge from several same-sex couples against the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Johnson also helped Louisiana defend its ban in three individual district court cases that comprised the Fifth Circuit case.”
Months after his 2014 remarks to the Shreveport Times, Johnson ran unopposed for a vacant seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives, and was sworn in, in February of 2015.
The following year, in 2016, Johnson was elected to the U.S. Congress.