Mike Johnson - Christian Nationalist

Great. Just what we (don't) need: an unabashed Christian Nationalist 2nd in line for the presidency.

Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy
The new speaker cut his teeth trying to erode the separation of church and state and abortion and LGBTQ rights as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund.

By Sarah Posner, MSNBC Columnist
Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected speaker of the House, is the most unabashedly Christian nationalist speaker in history.

No group has been more supportive of Donald Trump — and more likely to believe that the 2020 election was stolen — than Christian nationalists, who believe God wants the U.S. to be a promised land for their religion. Their champion may no longer be president, but, in Johnson, they now have a true believer second in line to the presidency. An enthusiastic backer of bogus legal theories seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the 51-year-old Johnson was first elected to the House in 2016. Before then, he cut his teeth trying to erode the separation of church and state and abortion and LGBTQ rights as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund – the Christian right legal powerhouse now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom.

I first encountered Johnson in 2007, when I was working on a story about the ADF’s ambitions to eviscerate the separation of church and state, and to elevate the rights of anti-LGBTQ Christians above those of LGBTQ people. At the time, marriage equality was not yet the law of the land, but ADF already was portraying LGBTQ rights as in direct conflict with those of conservative Christians. Johnson pushed this argument for years, along with ADF and other allies in the Republican Party and Christian right.

At the time, Johnson insisted to me that Christians were the ones facing discrimination. He claimed that “what we’re seeing in more and more cases is a discrimination against particular viewpoints, even outright hostility sometimes, against ... kids who hold a Christian kind of worldview who want to share Christian viewpoints or speech on campus, and they’re being discriminated against because some people see that as intolerant, or however they characterize it.”

the rest is here

fucking religious bullshit never ends