Mike Johnson made his 13-year-old daughter promise him that she wouldn’t have sex

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) took his daughter to a “purity ball” sometime around 2015, according to a recently resurfaced segment that his family recorded for a German TV news program. At the ball, a formal father-daughter dance popular among conservative Christians, Johnson had his daughter sign a pledge promising that she would not have sex until marriage.

The news segment is further evidence of Johnson’s obsession with his children’s and other people’s sex lives. He has previously said that he and his son monitor one another’s pornography viewing habits, and he has supported the criminalization of same-sex sexual encounters and believes same-sex marriage will lead to pedophilia and bestiality.

Related:

Mike Johnson says God will punish “depraved” U.S. because more teens identify as LGBTQ+

“God is mocked openly in the public square,” he said this past Sunday.

“This looks like a wedding,” the German news reporter says in the 2015 N-TV news segment. “But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and… daughter,” the reporter continues, mentioning Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah. She is in her 20s now.

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The news segment shows him and his daughter at the ball. There, she pledges to her father “to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children… to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity,” ABC News reported. He nods in agreement while he hears the pledge read aloud.

During another part of the news segment, Johnson’s wife Kelly, who runs a Christian counseling service that compared LGBTQ+ identities to bestiality on its website, tells the German interviewer, “We don’t talk to [our daughter] about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question.”

Purity balls gained popularity during the 1990s and 2000s. While conservative Christians claim that the balls encourage young girls to avoid sex before marriage, research shows that teens who sign chastity pledges are more likely to get pregnant than teens who don’t. Other critics say that such pledges and balls put too much pressure on young girls and foster the idea that men own their sexualities and genitalia.

In Johnson’s 2022 speech about the “War on Technology” at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, he said that he and his 17-year-old son both monitor one another’s use of pornography using “accountability software” called Covenant Eyes on their electronic devices. The software notifies one another to discourage them from visiting porn websites.

The use of the software is notable, considering Johnson’s preoccupation with queer people’s sex lives. He’s argued that gay sex should be illegal, opposes same-sex marriage, and is a proponent of debunked attempts to turn gay people straight.

Johnson himself is on the board of a conservative Christian publishing company that says MPOX is the “appropriate penalty” for being gay. His wife, in an October 3 call with the World Prayer Network, Johnson said that America is “dark and depraved” because there are too many LGBTQ+ people.

Mike and Kelly Johnson have complained about the “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 on their podcast this year.

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.” He also believed the fall of ancient Rome was caused by “rampant homosexual behavior.” 

Johnson previously served as a senior attorney and national spokesman for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), filing lawsuits against same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and same-sex marital benefits. When recently asked about his numerous anti-LGBTQ positions, Johnson told a Fox News interviewer that he didn’t remember some of them.