It doesn’t matter that Mike Johnson & wife are homophobic because they’re polite, friends whine

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has made a litany of extremely anti-LGBTQ+ statements throughout his career, and his wife, Kelly Johnson, founded a counseling service that equated being gay with bestiality. Despite the textbook nature of their homophobia, Kelly Johnson’s personal friends complained to the New York Times about how the couple is being “vilified” just because they hate LGBTQ+ people.

Their belief that LGBTQ+ people are inferior is “central to their identity” and shouldn’t be used against them, longtime friend Nancy Victory told the Times.

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Mike Johnson worked for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom for years and partnered with a conversion therapy organization to support an event where they pushed their beliefs on minors. He wrote a brief asking the Supreme Court to allow states to criminalize gay sex and, when questioned about his actions, he said to “go pick up a Bible.” He has solidly opposed LGBTQ+ equality in his tenure in Congress.

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Kelly Johnson founded Onward Christian Counseling Services, whose website said, “The Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God.” The page with the statement was only removed from the website several weeks ago, after her husband had been made speaker of the House.

While no one has come forward accusing her practice of performing conversion therapy on LGBTQ+ people yet, her service uses some fairly non-mainstream ideas from a mid-20th century eccentric who believed that gay people were all depressed – despite the lack of evidence for that claim – because homosexuality is antithetical to the Bible.

None of this matters to the Johnsons’ friends, they insist, because the Johnsons are polite.

According to the Times, one of her friends said that Kelly Johnson is “someone with a set of deeply held religious beliefs that guide her life—but also someone who is exceedingly polite to everyone she meets, regardless of their background or sexual orientation.”

Kelly Johnson’s friend Victory made sure to remind people that the Johnsons have a legal right to hold their beliefs, even though no one is saying that they don’t have such a right.

“In this country, we have a right to have our own beliefs—and they do too,” she said. “They are central to their identity.”

“People who don’t subscribe to those same beliefs vilify her for believing that,” another friend said. “Because you believe something doesn’t mean that you hate the person who does whatever it is you’ve spoken out against. You love the sinner and not the sin.”

Another unnamed friend tried to explain the anti-LGBTQ+ passage on Kelly Johnson’s counseling service’s website, saying that it was “misinterpreted” in the media. They said that Kelly Johnson was following guidelines from the National Christian Counseling Association that said to post such a warning in order to avoid legal action for refusing to counsel out LGBTQ+ people.

The friend insisted that the passage didn’t compare homosexuality to bestiality but just listed forms of sex outside of heterosexual marriage that the service considers sinful.

The Johnsons hosted a podcast where, as recently as this past summer, they were attacking LGBTQ+ people, criticizing “woke corporations” like Bud Light and “satanic” Disney during Pride Month while they praised Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh who is famous only for his attacks on transgender people.

“These are clearly unprecedented, unsettled, and very dangerous times for our children,” Kelly Johnson said on the podcast.