After three weeks of trying and failing to get a new Speaker of the House after getting rid of Kevin McCarthy, we got Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson, not just one out of hundreds of people with the same name, but our semi-new Speaker of the House, was voted in on October 25th, 2023. To be honest, before writing this article, I knew very little about Johnson, having only read a couple of articles about him and watching the SNL bit about him.
One of the first things I read about him was people saying how progressive Johnson his son is black. And while yes, having representation of multiracial families is a good thing (coming from someone in a multiracial family), I don’t believe that he should be praised for having a son who is a person of color.
One of the other first things that I heard about Johnson was his “homophobic past”. And while looking more into this I’m finding him saying “There is clearly no ‘right to sodomy’ in the Constitution ” and according to him he is basing this on his “Christian faith” even though the Christian faith is known for “loving thy neighbor”. This is not the only thing that he has said that backs the idea of him having a homophobic past and if you want more examples or details I encourage you to do your research.
Years ago he proposed a bill to ban federal funds from giving money to “sexually-oriented material” such as drag queens. Even though drag is not always sexually explicit and a lot of times is a form of artistic performance for people to express themselves and have fun with it, according to Johnson, “no federal tax dollars should go to any federal, state, or local government agencies, or private organizations that intentionally expose children under 10 years of age to sexually explicit material.”
While I don’t agree with the different things he has said or done, I do agree with his quote in 2018 that he made when commenting on the Endangered Species Act. Johnson famously said, “We cannot allow the fear of challenging the status quo to prevent us from taking a hard look at the ineffective policies put in place decades ago that have failed to meet the goals of the underlying statute”. However, I am yet to fully know what he means through this and what he plans to do about this.
A recent update from him is that to celebrate New Year’s, Johnson decided to post a picture of his family, but many commenters were annoyed and mad that it seemed like he decided to post a picture with all of his biological kids and leave out his adopted son mentioned above. However, out of what I could find on Michael Johnson, his son, was that he was asked to appear with Mike Johnson in the media and he said that he would rather live a more private life.
Overall, even after researching Mike Johnson, I still feel entirely undereducated to be writing this article about him. While he is famous enough to have an SNL skit written about him and people know him because of how long it took for him to be elected into office, there is still a lot to be learned about this man.
