Jen Bendery: He wrote an op-ed in 2014 making the case for building the Noah's Ark theme park. “When the Ark Project sails, everybody will benefit,” wrote Johnson, “even those who are stubbornly trying to sink it.”

Before coming to Congress, he spent 8 years as the senior attorney and national spokesperson for a Christian nationalist group dedicated to dismantling LGBTQ+ rights and outlawing abortion. This is Mike Johnson, the new House speaker. www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-j...

New Speaker Mike Johnson’s Long History With The Religious Rightwww.huffpost.com Come for the Noah's Ark theme park, stay for the relentless efforts to strip women's and LGBTQ+ rights.

From 2002 to 2010, Johnson led numerous lawsuits and campaigns for Alliance Defending Freedom, which was founded in 1993 and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Johnson first became a known entity in his state in the late 1990s, when he and his wife went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant laws, which made it harder to get a divorce.

The core mission of Alliance Defending Freedom is “to remake American law so that it favors cisgender, heterosexual, conservative, white Christian men and everyone [else] is a second-class citizen,” said @andrewlseidel.bsky.social. They formed as a group to counter to the ACLU.

Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ+ communities, has referred to Alliance Defending Freedom as ”arguably the most extreme anti-LGBT legal organization in the United States.” This is the group that fueled Mike Johnson's rise.

While with ADL, Johnson successfully defended Louisiana’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.” He got an award for that from the Family Research Council, another far-right anti-LGBTQ+ group that has been designated a hate group.

Johnson also led a campaign to counter GLSEN’s annual anti-bullying Day of Silence. “No one is for bullying and harassment,” Johnson said at the time. “But that’s cloaking their real message — that homosexuality is good for society.”

In 2005, Johnson joined then-state Rep. Steve Scalise on a "future of marriage" panel. He argued that domestic partner ordinances were a sham and really about trying to force Christians to accept LGBTQ rights. “Regardless of what you hear, it is not about benefits, OK?”

Johnson wouldn't even refer to same-sex couples as same-sex couples on this panel. It was "same-sex, live-in lovers." These "live-in lovers" want domestic partner benefits to make “that lifestyle made legitimate.... Don’t let anybody fool you and tell you otherwise.”

Here is a clip of Mike Johnson condemning "same-sex live-in lovers" for wanting legal protections. www.c-span.org/video/?c5090...

User Clip: Mike Johnson On Domestic Partner Ordinanceswww.c-span.org Mike Johnson On Domestic Partner Ordinances

CNN reported yesterday that Mike Johnson went so far as to write an editorial in support of criminalizing gay sex. www.cnn.com/2023/10/25/p...

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson once wrote in support of the criminalization of gay sex | CNN Poli...www.cnn.com Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a history of harsh anti-gay language from his time as an attorney for a socially conservative legal group in the mid-2000s.

Johnson led plenty of Alliance Defending Freedom lawsuits aimed at stripping women of their reproductive rights, too. In 2012, he sued the Obama admin for requiring religious employers to cover birth control in their health insurance coverage.

“The Obama administration has purposely transformed a non-existent problem — access to contraception — into a constitutional crisis,” Johnson argued in 2012, on behalf of Alliance Defending Freedom. Today, Alliance Defending Freedom is in court trying to ban medication abortion.

In another case in 2005, Johnson argued that New York violated the Constitution when it rejected “Choose Life” specialty license plates in state-funded program. "The denial of The Children First Foundation’s design is a prime example of the discrimination that can occur.”

Alliance Defending Freedom won that lawsuit in 2011 after seven years of litigation. Seven years.

In 2007, Johnson claimed that most people simply don’t understand Roe v. Wade, and if they did they wouldn't like it. “The abortion industry has waged a decadeslong deception campaign to suppress the truth about abortion,” he said, telling people to "learn the truth about Roe."

Johnson has found other ways to advance conservative Christian legal advocacy. In 2015, as the attorney for a Christian creationist ministry called Answers in Genesis, Johnson filed a federal lawsuit to get tax subsidies to build a Noah’s Ark amusement park.

He wrote an op-ed in 2014 making the case for building the Noah's Ark theme park. “When the Ark Project sails, everybody will benefit,” wrote Johnson, “even those who are stubbornly trying to sink it.”

That Noah’s Ark amusement park was eventually built in Kentucky. As of 2017, it was receiving $18 million in tax incentives. Here is its life-sized replica of Noah's Ark, which is based on the Genesis flood narrative in the Bible.

Johnson has not tamed his ideology since entering Congress. In April, he gave a House floor speech decrying the “so-called separation of church and state,” insisting there was nothing in the Constitution barring the government from supporting religious beliefs.

@andrewlseidel.bsky.social says what is particularly worrisome about Johnson’s ties to Alliance Defending Freedom is how powerful and connected the group is. It has been “working to build this shadowy network of power for decades,” he said. It declared more than $104M in revenue for 2021.

“You have a guy who is a constitutional attorney who is dialed into this network of power, with more than $100M annually. Put those two things together." "He was one of the architects of denying the election." "It’s terrifying. Really, truly terrifying.” www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-j...

New Speaker Mike Johnson’s Long History With The Religious Rightwww.huffpost.com Come for the Noah's Ark theme park, stay for the relentless efforts to strip women's and LGBTQ+ rights.

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