The wife of anti-LGBTQ+ House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Kelly Johnson, has taken her Christian counseling website offline. Its removal from the web comes several days after a publication revealed that the company’s operating documents called homosexuality “offensive to God” and compared it to bestiality and incest.
Its removal also occurred as Mike Johnson has claimed not to remember anti-gay statements he made during his time working as a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal counsel described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Democrats hope to use Mike Johnson’s extreme Christian conservatism as a way to try to win back the House in the 2024 elections
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“He’s anti-gay, anti-choice, pro-conspiracy theory. He seems terrific.”
An October 30 report from The Huffington Post noted that the now-defunct website categorized LGBTQ+ identities as “sexual immorality.” The company’s operating documents from 2017, notarized by Mike Johnson, stated, “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.” Johnson’s notary signature neither proves that he read nor agreed with the documents.
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Though the website is no longer online, its content remains viewable in the Internet Archive. Notably, Mike Johnson also recently removed 69 episodes of his and his wife’s podcast, Truth Be Told With Mike and Kelly Johnson, from his personal website, though the episodes remain on other podcast streaming services.
In the podcast, Mike Johnson complained about the non-existent “lesbian toys” in Disney’s Toy Story 4, criticized “woke corporations” like Bud Light and “satanic” Disney, and praised anti-transgender broadcaster Matt Walsh during Pride Month 2023.
Mike Johnson also recently claimed that he couldn’t remember numerous anti-LGBTQ+ statements he made while serving as a senior attorney and national media spokesman for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom.
Johnson has previously said that same-sex marriage will lead to “chaos and sexual anarchy” and “place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation.” He claimed legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to “pedophiles” seeking legal protections for having sex with kids and people trying to marry their pets. He has also said, “Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural… ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.”
He has sought to criminalize private gay sex between consenting adults, called gay marriage the “harbinger of chaos,” and said gay people should not be a protected class because they “are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”
“I don’t even remember some of [those statements],” Mike Johnson claimed last week when speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Democrats are planning to make Mike Johnson “a household name” leading into the 2024 election, highlighting his extremist positions as “a Trump-loving, election-denying, abortion ban-supporting, gay rights-opposing, climate change-rejecting, and conspiracy-believing conservative,” MSNBC’s Michael A. Cohen wrote.
Last year, Mike Johnson introduced a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” The bill threatens to cut federal funding to libraries, school districts, hospitals, government entities, or other organizations for “hosting or promoting any program, event, or literature involving sexually-oriented material,” including “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related topics.”
In a July hearing, Johnson – who serves as the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government – said that parents don’t have the right to provide their children with access to gender-affirming healthcare, something he falsely called a form of “abuse and physical harm,” even though every major American medical association has endorsed it as safe, effective, and essential to the well-being of trans youth.
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