Mentions Mike Johnson

It's intentionally the opposite of public safety. It's giving violent bigots carte blanche to assault any woman who doesn't meet their expectations of femininity. It's not designed to "work"; it's designed to sow chaos and fear.

These state bathroom bans provide few, if any details about how they would be enforced because they don’t need to — private citizens are often meant to be the enforcers, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.

“The way that the laws are de facto enforced is often through the emboldening of private individuals to police other people’s bathroom use,” he said. “There’s no written enforcement because the proponents of these bills know that just by talking about this, let alone enacting these laws, that they are emboldening individual people themselves to enforce these bathroom bans.”

A recent example that takes this formula to an extreme can be seen in Odessa, Texas. A new expansion of the West Texas town’s ordinance allows individual citizens to sue transgender people caught using bathrooms that match their gender identity and seek “no less than $10,000 in damages,” per the Texas Tribune.

Deputizing private citizens to enforce this kind of law enables high rates of harassment and violence against transgender people as well as cisgender people, Casey said, particularly women who do not conform to traditional ideas of femininity. 

The mainstream, elite media seems especially flummoxed by the new Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson was an obscure back-bencher on Capitol Hill and remains a man of mystery with no apparent bank account or tangible assets. But the extremism of his Christian nationalist views — more radical than anything seen in American history — are no secret. Johnson believes that our country should be ruled by his own brand of religious fundamentalism which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old but inspires hateful policies toward the LGBTQ community and fringe opposition to women’s abortion rights.

That danger isn’t conveyed in business-as-usual fluff pieces like the Washington Post’s “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family” article in which neighbors hailed the softer side of a man who was at the center of schemes to block the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Another Post piece questioned whether Democrats could truly make a political boogeyman out of Johnson given “his low profile and quiet tone” — as if Christo-fascism isn’t so bad when delivered in a gentle drawl, from behind oversized dad glasses.

Johnson is a perfect avatar for this project of marrying Christian nationalism with Trumpism. He’s soft-spoken in ways that hide his extremism. He’s a folksy fanatic—as Nelson notes: “Even some LGBTQ activists have acknowledged his winning ways, as he undermines their very right to exist. After the prolonged, acrimonious process of selecting a Speaker, his humorous, aw-shucks manner may have come as a relief to his weary colleagues.”

But make no mistake: He is among the most extreme Republicans around. Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that if you want to understand his politics, “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

In a 2003 article, Johnson wrote an editorial declaring, “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe [forbid] same-sex deviate sexual intercourse…. Proscriptions against sodomy have deep roots in religion, politics, and law.” He has described abortion as “a Holocaust.”

While serving in the Louisiana state legislature from 2015 to 2017, Johnson introduced a so-called “religious freedom” bill to legalize discrimination against married same-sex couples. He told the Baptist Message that he was “on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage.”

Last December, Johnson introduced a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law called the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.” The bill threatens to cut federal funding to libraries, school districts, hospitals, government entities, or other organizations for “hosting or promoting any program, event, or literature involving sexually-oriented material,” including “any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related topics.”

In a July hearing, Johnson — who serves as the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, said that parents don’t have the right to provide their children with access to gender-affirming healthcare, something he falsely called a form of “abuse and physical harm,” even though every major American medical association has endorsed it as safe, effective, and essential to the well-being of trans youth.