The Southern Baptist has denounced gay relationships and sought to narrow the separation between church and state.
By Isaac Stanley-Becker, The Washington PostHouse Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of N.Y., congratulates speaker-elect Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023.
Johnson had little luck with the polarizing proposal, which was voted down in committee. But when the bill died, the conservative firebrand did something unusual: He smiled for a picture with two of the activists who had worked to kill it. It’s that rare mix that elevated him to the speakership, after three weeks of failed votes that doomed better-known and more experienced candidates. The result is a Republican standard-bearer who is virtually unknown to the public, even as he was a leading proponent of former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
He was 12 years old when tragedy struck his family. His father, an assistant fire chief in Shreveport, responded to an explosion at a cold storage facility that badly burned 80 percent of his body. In law school, Johnson “carried himself like a minister,” Blaize said. “He didn’t drink very much, if at all. He was very socially conservative.”
In 2002, he jumped to the Alliance Defense Fund, as it was then known. The Christian nonprofit, a conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union, has been at the leading edge of litigating high-profile cases contesting protections for abortion, contraception coverage and gay and transgender rights.
House Speaker-elect Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., addresses members of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023. Republicans eagerly elected Johnson as House speaker on Wednesday, elevating a deeply conservative but lesser-known leader to the seat of U.S. power and ending for now the political chaos in their majority.
His field of cultural battle was broad — extending to the Christmas hearth. In 2005, his was a leading voice threatening public officials not to refer to Christmas trees as “holiday trees.” “A movement is underway in America today to censor, silence, and marginalize people of faith, and to erode our most fundamental rights,” said Johnson, a longtime trustee of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, explaining the need for firms like his. “We are concerned that many in our churches today have no idea of the storm that is coming.
The political neophyte spent little time licking his wounds after his legislative defeat. In June of that year, he was on the trial team defending a Louisiana state law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, according to Steve Aden, a former colleague at the Alliance Defense Fund who also joined the trial team. Proponents of such laws — a major test of abortion jurisprudence before the 2022 decision overturning Roe v.
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