Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s path in Republican politics began with a yearslong role as the senior attorney and national spokesperson for a group on the religious right dedicated to dismantling LGBTQ+ freedoms and outlawing abortion.
Johnson worked for that organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, for eight years, from 2002 to 2010, before serving a brief stint as a Louisiana state legislator and then heading to Congress in 2017. He first became a known entity in his state in the late 1990s when he and his wife went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant laws, which made it harder to get a divorce.
The social conservative causes that have fueled Johnson’s rise, many of which are deeply unpopular with the American public, are already worrisome to Democrats who fear that Johnson — who downplayed the concept of the separation of church and state as recently as April — may try to use the power of the speakership to advance his extreme views.
But some see a flip side, too: He is the perfect foil for the Democratic Party to run against in 2024.
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Johnson spent years making a name for himself at Alliance Defending Freedom, which was founded in 1993 and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the national organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and right-wing extremists.
Lambda Legal, a national civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ+ communities, has previously referred to Alliance Defending Freedom as ”arguably the most extreme anti-LGBT legal organization in the United States.”
The core mission of the Christian legal advocacy group, which used to be called Alliance Defense Fund, is “to remake American law so that it favors cisgender, heterosexual, conservative, white Christian men and everyone [else] is a second-class citizen,” said Andrew Seidel, an attorney and author of “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American.”
“If you look at the cases they’ve taken … everything they are doing is designed to get to that end goal,” Seidel said. “It is absolutely striking that this person [is] a couple of heartbeats away from the presidency.”
An Alliance Defending Freedom spokesperson pushed back on the idea that the organization is a hate group and directed HuffPost to a page on the organization’s website that is dedicated entirely to discrediting the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“While serving at Alliance Defending Freedom, Congressman Mike Johnson defended the rule of law and Americans’ most cherished liberties,” Kristen Waggoner, CEO and president of Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement. “We congratulate and wish him the best as he continues his service to our nation protecting the Constitution and all Americans’ foundational freedoms.”
In his role at the organization, Johnson in 2004 successfully defended Louisiana’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.”
The Family Research Council, another far-right anti-LGBTQ+ group that has been designated a hate group, honored Johnson with an award for that victory. It celebrated Johnson’s legal argument that Louisiana’s amendment “has one purpose: to protect marriage from attack.”
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In 2005, Johnson led the Alliance Defending Freedom’s campaign to counter GLSEN’s annual anti-bullying Day of Silence. GLSEN was previously known as the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network.
“No one is for bullying and harassment,” Johnson said at the time. “But that’s cloaking their real message — that homosexuality is good for society.”
That same year, he joined Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), a state legislator at the time, on a “Future of Marriage” panel at the Young Republicans National Convention. Johnson, representing Alliance Defending Freedom, argued that domestic partner ordinances were nonsense and really about trying to force Christians to embrace a certain ideology.
“Regardless of what you hear, it is not about benefits, OK?” Johnson said, noting he was leading a lawsuit at the time to eliminate New Orleans’ domestic partner ordinance.
Referring to gay couples as “same-sex, live-in lovers,” Johnson told the group that the real reason LGBTQ+ people wanted domestic partner benefits was to have “that lifestyle made legitimate. It’s about recognition of the lifestyle. It’s about teaching it as the equivalent of marriage. And don’t let anybody fool you and tell you otherwise.”
Here is a clip of Johnson condemning gay, live-in lovers:
In 2003, Johnson went so far as to write an editorial in support of criminalizing gay sex, as CNN first reported on Wednesday.
Johnson has led plenty of other Alliance Defending Freedom lawsuits aimed at stripping women of their reproductive rights. In 2012, he sued the Obama administration for requiring religious employers to cover birth control in their health insurance coverage.
“The Obama administration has purposely transformed a non-existent problem — access to contraception — into a constitutional crisis,” Johnson claimed at the time.
The conservative-led Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2020 that religious employers can deny birth control coverage.
In another case in 2005, Johnson argued in federal court that New York had violated the Constitution when it rejected “Choose Life” specialty license plates as part of a state-funded program.
“The state has no objective standards to govern the DMV’s decision regarding whether an eligible organization’s plate design is approved,” Johnson said at the time. “The denial of The Children First Foundation’s design is a prime example of the discrimination that can occur.”
Alliance Defending Freedom won that lawsuit in 2011 after seven years of litigation.
The Louisiana Republican claimed in 2007 that most people simply don’t understand Roe v. Wade — the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to have an abortion that was struck down in 2022 — and argued that if they did, they would not like it. Only one-third of Americans supported Roe v. Wade being overturned, according to polling.
“The abortion industry has waged a decadeslong deception campaign to suppress the truth about abortion,” Johnson told CBNNews, a branch of the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network founded by the late televangelist Pat Robertson. “If Americans knew the truth about Roe, they wouldn’t be as supportive.”
Shortly after Johnson was sworn in as speaker on Wednesday, Democratic operatives were eager to highlight his staunch social conservatism. President Joe Biden has signaled that he plans to run for reelection with messaging about protecting freedoms, including marriage equality and abortion rights.
“If Democrats could design in a lab the perfect candidate to run against, that person would look a lot like Mike Johnson,” Dan Pfeiffer, who served as the communications director in President Barack Obama’s White House, wrote in his newsletter.
Others said it was important the party break through Johnson’s cooler disposition, which sets him apart from his fellow conservative bomb-throwers.
“Scary guy,” said one senior Democratic operative. “Jim Jordan, but with better demeanor.”
This operative was referring to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a diehard ally of former President Donald Trump who also ran for speaker but was thwarted by colleagues for being a bully.
“Scary guy. Jim Jordan, but with better demeanor.”
– Senior Democratic operative
Most Democrats in Congress don’t know much about Johnson beyond his record of being very anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he represents many in the GOP who are intent on rolling back basic liberties that were otherwise thought to be enshrined in the nation’s legal framework.
“The new speaker is an unknown,” Blumenthal said Wednesday. “In terms of what his past positions will mean for future legislation … that incorporates the views that he expressed in the past relating to LGBTQ rights or reproductive health care.”
Johnson has certainly taken some strange stands in the vein of conservative Christian legal advocacy. In 2015, as the attorney for a Christian creationist ministry called Answers in Genesis, Johnson filed a federal lawsuit to get tax subsidies to build a Noah’s Ark amusement park in Kentucky.
He wrote an op-ed the year before making the case for building the Ark Encounter.
“When the Ark Project sails, everybody will benefit,” wrote Johnson, “even those who are stubbornly trying to sink it.”
The Noah’s Ark park was eventually built and, as of 2017, was receiving $18 million in tax incentives.
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Johnson has not tamed his ideology since entering Congress. In April, he gave a speech decrying the “so-called separation of church and state,” insisting there was nothing in the Constitution barring the government from supporting religious beliefs.
“The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” Johnson said.
The establishment and free exercise clauses of the Constitution’s First Amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — are generally viewed as limiting both the government’s involvement in religion and religion’s involvement in government.
Seidel said what is particularly worrisome about Johnson’s ties to Alliance Defending Freedom is how powerful and connected the group is.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett did five paid speaking engagements for the group before being confirmed to the high court. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) previously took money from the group, too. Hawley’s wife, Erin Hawley, is currently senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom and leading its legal effort to ban medication abortion nationwide.
Alliance Defending Freedom has been “working to build this shadowy network of power for decades,” Seidel said, noting that it has amassed an incredible amount of money. It declared more than $104 million in revenue for 2021.
“They’re a juggernaut,” he said.
“So now you have a guy who is a constitutional attorney who is dialed into this network of power, with more than $100 million annually,” Seidel added. “Put those two things together. He was one of the architects of denying the election. It’s terrifying. Really, truly terrifying.”
Kevin Robillard and Igor Bobic contributed reporting.