The link Ten Grain has is a gift link which allows you to read the WaPo article. When I try to post them people hit the paywall. So please go enjoy the meme Ten Grain posted and follow the link. Hugs. Scottie
Category: MAGA / Republican
Military Holds
More Alarm Raised Over GOP Christian Nationalism
the founding fathers knew of the massacres that happened in europe over whether you were protestant or catholic so, of course, they did not want that to happen here, and thus we have freedom of religion. Stupid republicans.
“Many professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible.”
Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Christian conservative Discovery Institute, said in 2012 that Barton’s books and videos are full of “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”
– Wikipedia entry under his name
Same as Creationists who are all lying amateurs who cherry picks quotes, articles, and outdated materials from the Bible, history, and especially science.
so true,some nutcase politician from NC runs bible classes on sunday..tells the kids that satan created ALL the fossil evidence,just to confuse us and ,that the earth is truly only 6k years old (sigh)..Bartons got plenty of company in the b/s dept.
It was noted that Jefferson felt that the inclusion of any Christian language must be excluded, as he felt that in the future, that enlightened Americans would move away from Christianity, but such any Christian language included in the Constitution might invalidate or complicate its interpretation by a more enlightened America.
…And look where we are with theocrats at the gates, claiming gawd is in the Constitution…somewhere.
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to his nephew
“The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion.” — George Washington & John Adams in a diplomatic message to Malta
“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” — John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Lighthouses are more useful than churches” — Benjamin Franklin
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Adams
Texas activist David Barton wants to end separation of church and state. He has the ear of the new U.S. House speaker.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/03/david-barton-mike-johnson-texas-church-state-christianity/
Wake up US public. The Christian theocratic take over of the government is well underway. This is just like Afghanistan and Iran, other countries where religions were allowed to start shaping and making the laws. Individual rights, progressive societies, even science and medical knowledge becomes restricted and regressive to a time of what was written in old holy books as people interpret them now for their own power and profit. Lying and out right making things up is OK to these people in order to institute the Christian dominated society ruled by church doctrine rather than by the will or for the good of the people. This fake historian has rewritten history, simply made up stuff, ignored other stuff and has been used for decades in home and religious schools to spread a false fake understanding of history that now those who were taught it as kids are in positions of authority in state legislatures and as judges to enforce those lies and myths. I remember James as a teen coming to our home after school telling us all about how the founding fathers were highly religious Christians, the laws of the country were founded on Moses and the bible, and that worshiping god was why we became an independent nation, because god himself bless his holy Christian nation. And we had to work hard to get back to that ideal so god would be happy and give us more blessing. After all, it was the liberals with their sexual immorality and push to undo gender roles, take women from the home raising children, and perverting god’s ideal lifestyle of marriage and men’s right to dominate. They also were trying to take god away from everyone and all that was making god angry and he might smite all of us. Such nonsense we had to gently correct for him. Then he would go home to his highly religious very unchristian parents who pushed religion but did not live it. It is scary what is happening. We need to stop it. Hard stop. Hugs
Credit: Bob Daemmrich for The Texas TribuneFor nearly four decades, Texas activist David Barton has barnstormed statehouses and pulpits across the nation, arguing that the separation between church and state is a myth and that America should be run as a Christian nation.
Now, he’s closer to power than perhaps ever before.
One day after little-known Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elected as the new House speaker last week, Barton said on a podcast that he was already discussing staffing with Johnson, his longtime ally in deeply conservative, Christian causes.
“We have some tools at our disposal now (that) we haven’t had in a long time,” Barton added.
Johnson recently spoke at an event hosted by Barton’s nonprofit, WallBuilders; he’s praised Barton and his “profound influence on me, and my work, and my life and everything I do”; and, before his career as a lawmaker, Johnson worked for Alliance Defending Freedom — a legal advocacy group that has helped infuse more Christianity into public schools and government, a key goal of Barton’s movement.
Barton, who lives in Aledo, has been a staple of Texas’ own Christian conservative movement, offering crucial public support to politicians and frequently being cited or called on to testify in favor of bills that critics say would erode church-state separations — including in front of the Texas Legislature this year.
Johnson’s election — and his proximity to Barton — is a massive victory for a growing Christian nationalist movement that claims the United States’ foundation was ordained by God, and therefore its laws and institutions should favor their brand of Christianity.
“Johnson’s rise means that Barton and his fellow Christian nationalists now have unprecedented access to the levers of power on the national stage, paralleling the access they already have here in Texas and some other states,” said David Brockman, a non-resident scholar in religion and public policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Barton and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment this week
Barton has spent nearly all of his life in North Texas, save for the few years he spent at Oral Roberts University, an evangelical school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After graduating with a degree in religious education, he returned to Aledo and worked as a math and science teacher, basketball coach and, later, principal at a K-12 school that grew out of his parent’s Bible study group, according to a 2006 Texas Monthly profile of him.
In 1988, Barton founded his group, WallBuilders, to “exert a direct and positive influence in government, education, and the family by educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country” and “providing information to federal, state, and local officials as they develop public policies which reflect Biblical values,” according to the group’s website.
Since then, Barton has been arguably the most influential figure in a growing movement to undermine the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Barton claims the clause has been misunderstood. He argues that most of the Founding Fathers were “orthodox, evangelical” Christians, and that it would thus be more accurate to read the establishment clause’s use of the word “religion” as a stand-in for “Christian denomination.”
“We would best understand the actual context of the First Amendment by saying, ‘Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination,’” he has said.
Barton also argues that the country’s founders “never intended the First Amendment to become a vehicle to promote a pluralism of other religions.”
In his mind, the wall separating church and state was only meant to extend one way, protecting religion — specifically, Christianity — from the government, but not vice versa.
“‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” his group’s website claims.
And he argues that most of what he considers society’s ills — from school shootings, low standardized test scores and drug use to divorce, crime and LGBTQ+ people — are the natural consequences of abandoning the Judeo-Christian virtues, as articulated in his form of Christianity, that he says are the bedrock of the nation’s founding. Sometimes, he’s drawn fire for those views — such as when he said the lack of cure for AIDS was God’s vengeance for homosexuality or when he compared the Third Reich’s “evils” to the “homosexual lifestyle” in 2017.
Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian,” has for years been debunked and ridiculed by actual historians and scholars, who note that he has no formal training and that his work is filled with selective quotes, mischaracterizations and inaccuracies — critiques that Barton has claimed are mere attacks on his faith. He has been accused of whitewashing the Founding Fathers — particularly, their slave owning — to fit his narrative of a God-ordained nation. He has acknowledged using unconfirmed quotes from historical figures. And Barton’s 2012 book, “The Jefferson Lies,” was so widely panned by Christian academics that it prompted a separate book, “Getting Jefferson Right,” to debunk all of his inaccuracies, and was later pulled by its Christian publisher because “the basic truths just were not there.”
Despite that, Barton has remained a fixture in conservative Christian circles and Republican Party politics. He served as vice chair of the Republican Party of Texas from 1997 to 2006 and, in 2004, was tapped for clergy outreach by President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign. In 2010, his fellow Texan and prominent conservative personality Glenn Beck praised him as “the most important man in America right now.” Barton was an early and important endorser of Sen. Ted Cruz’s unexpected first win in 2012. And in 2016, Barton ran one of multiple super PACs that were crucial to Cruz’s reelection.
“Having David Barton running the super PAC gives it a lot of validity for evangelicals and pastors,” Mike Gonzalez, the South Carolina evangelical chair for the Cruz for President campaign, told the Daily Beast at the time.
In Texas, Barton has become increasingly instrumental among GOP politicians. He and WallBuilders currently work closely with Rick Green, a former state representative and current leader of Patriot Academy, a Dripping Springs-based group that trains young adults, churches and others how to “influence government policy with a Biblical worldview” and borrows heavily from Barton’s teachings.
Barton has also railed against the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt groups, including churches, from direct political advocacy. And he is frequently called on to support laws that would infuse more Christianity into public life — including in public schools. In May, he and his son, Timothy Barton, testified in favor of a bill — which later failed — that would have required all Texas public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
During the hearing, Barton’s work was praised as “great” by Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels. His theories were echoed by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, who said that church-state separation is “not a real doctrine.” And the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, extolled Barton and his son as “esteemed witnesses.”
Other prominent Texas Republicans have similarly echoed Barton’s views, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who has called the United States “a Christian nation” and said “there is no separation of church and state. It was not in the Constitution.”
“We were a nation founded upon not the words of our founders, but the words of God because he wrote the Constitution,” Patrick said last year.
The mainstreaming of Barton’s views has corresponded with a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have allowed for a greater infusion of Christianity into the public sphere, and a burgeoning Christian nationalist movement on the right that was turbocharged by former President Donald Trump and his promise to white evangelicals that “Christianity will have power” should they support him.
February polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with foundational aspects of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society. Experts have also found strong correlations between Christian nationalist beliefs and opposition to immigration, racial justice and religious diversity.
Johnson’s election to House Speaker shows how normalized such beliefs have become, said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for a strong wall between government and religion. She noted that some Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, have embraced the title of Christian nationalist in recent years.
Tyler said that Johnson’s views are particularly concerning because of his background as both a Southern Baptist and as a constitutional lawyer. Baptists, she noted, have a long history of advocacy for strong church-state separations because of the persecution they faced during the country’s founding — a stance that she said Johnson has betrayed throughout his legal and political career.
“He has worked actively for these principles that further Christian nationalism,” Tyler said. “I am also a Baptist, and to see someone who is a Baptist really reject foundational concepts of religious freedom for all — concepts which are really core to what it means to be a Baptist — is also very disheartening.”
Johnson played a central role in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by crafting a legal brief that was signed by more than 100 U.S. House Republicans in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that sought to have election results thrown out in four swing states by President Joe Biden.
At the same time that he was aiding the legal charge to overturn the 2020 election, Johnson was also cultivating closer ties to figures in the New Apolostolic Reformation, a fast-growing movement of ultraconservative preachers, televangelists, self-described prophets and faith healers who abide by the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — a Christian nationalist-adjacent theology that says Christians must fulfill a divine mandate to rule over all seven aspects of society (family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government) in order to usher in the “end times.”
Driven by that theology, New Apolostic Reformation figures played major roles in the lead up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, combining Trump’s lies about a stolen election with claims that they were engaged in “spiritual warfare” with their political enemies and, thus, extreme and anti-democratic measures were not only necessary, but God-ordained.
Disclosure: Rice University, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and Texas Monthly have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/ce3304c12c048d392c33fa8f29b1eb09/BD%20INC%20Barton%20David%202012)
Man Get Three Years In Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crime Spree- JMG
An Oregon man was sentenced today to 37 months in prison and three years of supervised release for attempting to run over three people with a car as part of a week-long crime spree targeting the LGBTQI+ community around Boise, Idaho, in October 2022.
According to court records, on Oct. 8, 2022, while at the Boise Public Library Main Branch in downtown Boise, Matthew Alan Lehigh, 31, approached a transgender library employee, called her a slur, punched her and threatened to stab her.
A member of the library’s security staff intervened, and Lehigh fled into the parking lot. When the security guard attempted to speak to Lehigh in the parking lot, Lehigh got into a car and suddenly accelerated it toward the guard, intending to collide with him.
The guard narrowly escaped being struck by jumping behind a concrete barricade at the last moment, and Lehigh fled the scene.
Four days later, while sitting in his car in a public parking lot elsewhere in Boise, Lehigh saw two women walking together towards another vehicle.
Assuming that the women were lesbians, Lehigh began shouting threats and slurs at them, then suddenly accelerated his car toward the women, intending to collide with them. The women jumped out of the path of Lehigh’s oncoming car, which struck the other vehicle at significant speed.
On June 15, 2022, Lehigh pleaded guilty to one felony count of violating the Hate Crimes Prevention Act for the vehicular assault on the library security guard, and a second felony violation for the vehicular assault on the two women.
As part of his plea agreement, Lehigh also admitted that he was responsible for three other instances of anti-LGBTQI+ vandalism and violence that occurred in Boise during early October 2022.
Specifically, he admitted to setting fire to a rainbow-striped “pride” flag attached to a residential property in North Boise, breaking several windows at a commercial building jointly occupied by an LGBTQI+ community organization and an LGBTQI+-affirming religious congregation and punching a grocery store customer after calling him an anti-LGBTQI+ slur.
Read the full press release.
Smiths Station Mayor F.L. Bubba Copeland
what a thing to wake up to, a morning news feed about a man who was helpful, involved, loving, caring, preached acceptance and caring for others. He worked hard in the community, helping the best he could during crises. He had something he did that was found out, something he said he did as a hobby With his wife in the privacy of their own home and on social media under a pseudonym. It involved only them from all the stories I have read and I want to read more of them but first I want to share what hate has caused. The online accounts were not offensive or harmful, just someone role playing a part of themselves online. Talking with others who had the same interests and feelings, not harmful to anyone.
See what happen next was due to hate and intolerance. Refusing to see the good of someone, of who they are, because they are different from you in some way you don’t like. Hatred of them not because they harmed you but don’t live just as you do.
Bubba like to dress up as a woman. I must say he looked really good as a woman. He smiled more as a woman than when dressed as a man. But several anti-LGBTQIA hate groups claimed he was a drag queen or trans and to them all drag queens / trans people no matter how much good they do are evil, are sin, need to be erased from society. For something that did not affect / or effect them in any way except, someone was a bit different and enjoyed doing something a bit different from what the anti-trans haters did. These people made it a point to try to turn the community against this good man. They doxed him, exposed his private life to the public, pictures of him in drag, all his home information was doxed to a country wide network of haters who went to work online. The contacted other Baptist organizations to rile up dislike and hate, to get the main church bodies to turn against his smaller church in an attempt to get him removed as pastor. They claimed publicly in meetings and online that he was unfit to lead the community he had been doing so for so long and well. They tried to create an angry outraged mob to attack this man and make his life hell on earth. Just because he put on a dress, a wig, and make up. He had social media accounts in the female persona and according to what I read they were not offensive in any way. That was his sin. That was his great crime. The result they got was he took his own life. He killed himself due directly to them, the haters, the anti-drag, the anti-trans. Are they happy now? Do they think by removing someone who cared about others and worked hard to help his community is better not being there? What did they gain except spreading hate and hardship? What about the surviving members of his family, his wife, his three children, all the others? What has this great religious purge gave them, except more hardship, the loss of a loved one, grief? Yes that is what their hate brings, grief. They spread it thick, far, and wide. That is what their hate does. Don’t help them, please don’t help them. Love, acceptance, tolerance, patience with, for, and to others is what we need to spread. And trust me it will not be a one way street. Hugs. Scottie
Below I will post several videos I have seen. I ask you to please watch them if you can, and to read the Joe My god story and the comments. Best wishes, hopes for a better future for all of us when the hate stops. Hugs
Quotes from the tweet above.
Copeland addressed his Baptist congregation on Wednesday night, stating that he was the victim of an “internet attack” and declaring, “Yes, I have taken pictures with my wife in the privacy of our home in an attempt of humor because I know I’m not a handsome man nor a beautiful woman either. I apologize for any embarrassment caused by my private, personal life that has come publicly.”
Unfortunately, bigoted Baptist leaders in Alabama issued a damming statement saying they had “become aware of the alleged unbiblical behavior.”
Today, Copeland took his own life, according to police. They did not release any further details. One of his close friends responded to the tragic news by declaring, “I am so angry right now and heartbroken. I witnessed a good man be publicly ridiculed and crucified over the last few days…to the point that he just took his own life today. I knew he was suffering so I reached out to him yesterday and offered him support and encouragement. He was appreciative and acknowledged that he had been going through some “dark days” over the last few days. I just want to ask you people who thought it humorous to publicly ridicule him, ‘Are you happy now?’ What crime did he commit?”
Other friends of Copeland noted that he didn’t hold bigoted views “toward transgender people or people who enjoy cross-dressing,” so there was simply no need for the conservative news outlet to out him.
Audio Shows Mike Johnson Promoting Ex-Gay Torture
I have been reading rumors that Mike Johnson was a regular in a popular gay bar and was well known to go home with men. He also is said to be currently exchange emails with the boy about their shared “addiction to porn and masturbation”. He adopted the boy who was 14 when he was a single man, just as Matt Gaetz adopted the preteen Nestor. I am not able to confirm yet the gay rumors, and there is no reason to suspect child abuse just because he was single at the time of adoption, but I do find it weird to be sharing with your son that you have an addition to porn and love to masturbate? But I am sure the truth will come out. So many of these rabid anti-gay religious people are gay and think god will cure them. It is the same with gay guys who go into the military to “man up and go straight”. It doesn’t work. Hugs. Scottie
“It’s time for an honest conversation about homosexuality. There’s freedom to change if you want to. Our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and cannot change. But what these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do. It’s not something that you are.” – House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking about the now-defunct ex-gay torture group Exodus International and his joint mission with them on a Christian counter protest to the annual anti-bullying Day Of Silence. As you’ll see in the clip below, Johnson goes on to blame the acceptance of homosexuality for the fall of the Roman Empire. Yes, really.
Scamvangelical Posts Candidates For 30 School Boards
PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: Wommack says homosexuals should have a “warning label on their foreheads.” Wommack says he prayed away “the curse of mildew.” Wommack says Jesus protects Christians from COVID by “turning off your virus receptors.” Two dozen Christians get infected with COVID at Wommack’s illegal bible conference. Wommack says he knows COVID is “no big deal” because his wife and son were “raised from the dead.”
I went to the link in the story above. This guy is one hell of a piece of shit hate preacher. He wants a complete take-over of civilian life, politics, government, every aspect of your life he wants to control. It is a total power grab for him and his followers, in the name of his god of course. Someone has to speak for god, he was just the one chosen to rule your life. Some of the batshit crazy stuff in the article will chill you on what these people believe. And they’re doing it by stealth and then steam rolling over ever right of others to form their perfect society in the name of their god, you know the one that god wants so to hell with your wants or needs. And as you can see they will break the law because god’s will is far more important than the laws of men. Plus once in power they will brook no disagreement with them, 1st amendment be damned. Some quotes listed below. There is much more of the danger these people represent in the article and the Joe My God post also.
“We have enough people here in this school we could elect anybody we want,” he said at a meeting of the Citizen’s Academy, an event held at Charis by the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a nonprofit organization also founded by Wommack. “This county ought to be totally dominated by believers.”
When voters in 30 school districts go to the polls Tuesday (Nov. 7), they will find ballots primed with candidates recruited and trained by Transform Colorado, a movement, launched by Truth & Liberty, “that unites Christian leaders to restore biblical values in the public square,” according to its website.
As in Woodland Park, where Wommack succeeded in getting his chosen candidates elected to City Council and gaining a majority on the school board, the goal, in the words of one victor, is to oppose “the teachers’ union and their psycho agenda.”
Truth & Liberty has lately served as Wommack’s main tool in reversing Colorado’s shift from red to blue, a tragedy he blames on “demonic” liberals. As proof, Wommack has claimed his “spies” in the local school system had found hundreds of obscene books. He warned that public schools taught fourth graders how to have anal sex and that they placed litter boxes in classrooms for students who identified as dogs or cats.
Wommack is harsh in his opposition to LGBTQ rights. The day after five people were killed and 18 injured in a Nov. 19, 2022, shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Wommack said he was “not endorsing” violence against LGBTQ people but complained they received too much sympathy, calling homosexuality “one of the major threats of the devil.”
But once elected, Woodland Park’s new conservative majority worked quickly — sometimes meeting in private, she alleged, in violation of state law — to turn the district upside down.
The district became the first and, so far, only locality in the U.S. to adopt the controversial American Birthright social studies curriculum, which has been rejected by Colorado’s State Board of Education. Since it was adopted, some students have been required to perform make-up work to qualify for college admission.
The school board also put a gag order on faculty and staff who disagreed with the changes, firing some who aired their concerns anyway. Recently, more than 80 teachers and staff signed a letter condemning the new “culture of fear and silence” and calling for solutions that “prioritize our children’s futures over politics.”
The district now budgets more than $200,000 a year for legal fees, more than 10 times its legal budget five years ago.
Despite the controversy, Wommack has given the new board his full support. Charis bused nearly 100 students to a May meeting where a vote was being held to elect a new superintendent, displacing hundreds of parents and teachers who were barred by capacity regulations. Some citizens now gather as much as five hours early at board meetings to make sure they can speak and vote.
Students from Charis, which operates a Practical Government school, also often sign up for many of the limited public speaking slots, using their allotted time to criticize “violent, extreme radicals, communists and socialists taking over our schools.”
It would be a useful voting guide for me to know who to vote against.
Bet they are only sending the voting guide to people on the church mailing lists.
Which hopefully someone will leak.
People ask: how do we know who the stealth candidates are so we can vote against them? This is how. Look for who the christfascists are voting for and vote for anyone else. It’s not perfect (some can still slip through) but it will help.
I agree with the idea but…how do I find out who the Republicans are supporting? I can sometimes know when I see school board candidates signs on the same lawn as a Trump one but, mostly, I have to try and read between the lines on their webpages to see if they’re idiots or not…and some hide it really well!
My favorite….
They’re not just targeting trans kids. For example, in states where these extremists have seized control of education, they’ve banned books, pedagogical content and practices and entire subjects, adopted curricula and standards and materials that turn the clock waaaay back on the rights and recognition of BBIMP, immigrants, Jews, people practicing minority religions, women and girls, disabled people as well LGBTQI+ people.
American Talibangelists…
Before you know it, women and girls will be banned from schools.
Just some things I found this morning
Before he became a politician, House Speaker Mike Johnson partnered with an anti-gay conversion therapy group
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/politics/mike-johnson-kfile-invs/index.html
Every major medical association affirm that conversion therapy is torture and not medically sound. It doesn’t work and creates lifelong issues and problems. It is abuse. Sexual orientation is something one is born with. No matter who you find sexually attractive, ask your self when you choose that? Who sits down with a bunch of different pictures of men and women and says you know I think I will be sexually attracted to these. It is a body reaction, not a mental one. My dogs that love gravy these people understand that because they use torture methods including some put electrodes on kid’s scrotum to shock them if they get excited over male nudes. WTF, no one chooses and these people did not choose who they are attracted to and get the tingles from. The fact is they demand we all ignore reason and medical science so their holy book written 2,500 years ago when people were ignorant even of germs that caused sickness is correct. Yes they tell us, just ignore everything that makes sense and the medical people are telling us to that the desert nomads of 2,500 years ago are correct. The want an old dusty geopolitical warlord text to relate to our modern life. Why did their god not know about cell phones? Why wait to give life-saving health information to the people. Because their god only knew what the people 2,500 knew. Do they really want to claim that is the highest pinnacle of human knowledge? But what is telling is his organization tells kids / teens they don’t need to accept kids who are different. He is telling kids to not be tolerant or even accepting of LGBTQIA kids in schools. Just like he doesn’t want to accept or tolerate that there are LGBTQIA people in society he has to accept are there. Kill them all, or if you can not do that, just make don’t say gay laws that erase them from society. Hugs. Scottie
5 minute readNewly elected Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) in the House chamber after his election at the US Capitol on October 25, 2023 in Washington, DC.Speaker of the House Mike Johnson closely collaborated with a group in the mid-to-late 2000s that promoted “conversion therapy,” a discredited practice that asserted it could change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian individuals.
Prior to launching his political career, Johnson, a lawyer, gave legal advice to an organization called Exodus International and partnered with the group to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens, according to a CNN KFile review of more than a dozen of Johnson’s media appearances from that timespan.
Founded in 1976, Exodus International was a leader in the so-called “ex-gay” movement, which aimed to make gay individuals straight through conversion therapy programs using religious and counseling methods. Exodus International connected ministries across the world using these controversial approaches.
The group shut down in 2013, with its founder posting a public apology for the “pain and hurt” his organization caused. Conversion therapy has been widely condemned by most major medical institutions and has been shown to be harmful to struggling LGBTQ people.
At the time, Johnson worked as an attorney for the socially conservative legal advocacy group, Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). He and his group collaborated with Exodus from 2006 to 2010.
For years, Johnson and Exodus worked on an event started by ADF in 2005 known as the “Day of Truth” – a counterprotest to the “Day of Silence,” a day in schools in which students stayed silent to bring awareness to bullying faced by LGBTQ youth.
The Day of Truth sought to counter that silence by distributing information about what Johnson described as the “dangerous” gay lifestyle.
“I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” Johnson told one radio host in 2008 promoting the event. “What these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do, it’s not something that you are.”
In print, radio and on television, Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, frequently disparaged homosexuality, according to KFile’s review. He advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and went so far as to partially blame it for the fall of the Roman Empire.
“Some credit to the fall of Rome to not only the deprivation of the society and the loss of morals, but also to the rampant homosexual behavior that was condoned by the society,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.
Johnson’s office did not respond to a CNN request for comment asking about his work with Exodus.
A close collaboration
Exodus International joined ADF’s Day of Truth event in 2006 and the groups worked together on promotional material for the event, including a standalone website which pointed users to Exodus’ conversion ministries. Documents on that website cited the since-repudiated academic work in support of conversion therapy. Exodus Youth, the group’s youth wing, promoted the event within its blogs.
Videos put out by Exodus and ADF on their standalone Day of Truth website featured two Exodus staffers speaking about how teens didn’t need to “accept” or “embrace” their homosexuality. The videos featured testimonials of a “former-homosexual” and “former lesbian.”
Documents on the website were not archived online but were saved by anti-conversion therapy groups such as Truth Wins Out in 2007 and 2008. The website featured a FAQ on homosexuality provided by Exodus and sold t-shirts saying, “the Truth cannot be silenced.”
One video featured Johnson, who was later quoted in a press release on Exodus International’s website ahead of the event, saying, “An open, honest discussion allows truth to rise to the surface.”
Johnson promoted the event heavily in the media – through radio interviews, comments in newspapers, and an editorial. In interviews, he repeatedly cited the case of a teen who went to school after the Day of Silence wearing a shirt that read, “Be ashamed. Our school has embraced what God has condemned” and “Homosexuality is shameful.” The teen was suspended and ADF represented him in legal action over the incident. The case was dismissed because the teen graduated, and the court found he no longer had standing to challenge the dress code.
“Day of Truth was really established to counter the promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008.
Those who worked to counter ADF and Exodus at the time, said the event was dangerous to confused youth.
“This directly harmed LGBTQ youth,” Wayne Besen, the executive director of Truth Wins Out and an expert on the ex-gay industry, told CNN. “This is someone whose core was promoting anti-gay and ex-gay viewpoints. He wouldn’t pander to anti-gay advocates, he was the anti-gay and ex-gay advocate.”
Randy Scobey, a former executive vice president at Exodus, who worked on the Day of Truth in the organization’s collaboration with ADF, called the event one of his biggest regrets.
“It was bullying those who were trying to not be bullied,” said Scobey, who now lives openly as a gay man. “That was one of the public ways that the Alliance Defense Fund worked with us.”
Ties between Exodus and ADF extended beyond the event.
ADF, which has since changed its name to the Alliance Defending Freedom, touted Exodus International in promotional brochures in 2004, crediting it as an organization that “played an instrumental role in helping thousands of individuals come out of homosexual behavior.”
Scobey recalled Johnson as quiet, but firm in his beliefs that homosexuality was wrong. He said Johnson and ADF provided crucial legal advice to Exodus and its “member ministries.”
“We worked with them behind the scenes a lot,” Scobey told CNN, saying the group offered them legal guidance over their ex-gay counseling. “They were very important to us as far as helping us to feel more secure legally and politically.”
Exodus International stopped sponsoring the Day of Truth event in 2010, saying it became adversarial and counterproductive.
As I previously reported, Johnson and Alliance Defending Freedom helped create the so-called Day Of Truth as an on-campus Christian counter protest to GLSEN’s annual anti-bullying Day Of Silence.
Per CNN’s new reporting, Mike Johnson collaborated with Exodus for years on the Day Of Truth.
When Exodus finally collapsed in 2013, founder Alan Chambers issued a lengthy apology and admitted on CNN that ex-gay torture had never turned any of his thousands of victims heterosexual. Not a single one. Video below.
Exodus was a steaming pile of self hating homos hitting on each other. If Johnson was working with them, he was likely fucking around with one or more of them. There is tea that needs to be spilled.
A Netflix documentary call Pray Away dropped earlier this year. Tip of the iceberg stuff. There is another (now out) gay man that spent his professional life working for the LDS church and living a lie. He is now speaking his truth. Johnson has got gay face to the level that breaks my gaydar machine to a smoking ruin. I grew up among people just like him.
Exodus is an example of that fine xstian love bullshit. This presumably straight guy and his ilk should be forced into homosexual conversion, although, I suspect that they are, in reality, self-hating (for whatever reason) Gays who tried to convince themselves and the desperate Gays and/or their families who attended conversion camps that it could be done. If by some chance you have not seen “Boy Erased” I highly recommend it. It’s a very well done feature film on this very subject. IMHO it’s a 5 star winner. “Fair Haven” is another good one. There are a number of films on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
In the Netflix documentary, Pray Away, your assertions are confirmed. There wouldn’t need to be any homosexual conversion because most of them were gayer than geese the entire time. Imagine that. Several of the leaders admit to the lie. Boy Erased was heartbreaking, and Fair Haven really drove home the isolation and self hatred that many of us have been forced to carry.
I hope his “adopted” African American son steps forward with clarification on their relationship. I have a strong suspicion Johnson does not want that to happen.
I think he’s 40/in his 40s now? The article I read said he went into Johnson’s “custody” when he was 14 and Johnson was something like 27. Or maybe younger. It was before he was married. Strong “Nestor” vibes there.
That’s not to say that a young, single man can’t adopt a teenager he wants to help, just that it’s unusual enough that there should maybe be some extra scrutiny of the situation.
Republicans were actually really smart about how they slipped this guy in under the radar. People actually believed that the chair would remain vacant because the GOP couldn’t get their shit together… but in fact, they were just holding out for a true Nazi to install.
There’s a couple of TikTok videos going around in which Louisiana locals claim that Johnson was once a well-known patron at the Baton Rouge gay bar Central Station. I’ve found no reputable reporting on this, but nothing would be surprising when it comes to closeted Republicans.
Here’s one of those TikTok clips: https://www.tiktok.com/@mam…
Methinks He Doth Protest Too Much is entirely a thing.
maybe that is why he has a covenant marriage, so he can’t get out of it.
The Apache Drive-In over in Tyler, Texas is closer. It’s long been a hookup spot for the sexually frustrated from East Texas and northwest Louisiana.
As someone pointed out he adopted a 14yo boy when he was 25 or 26 and then married a conversion therapist 2 years later.
Hmmm. Wonder how long it took him to seek out the therapy?
You seem to think he sought therapy, instead of the obvious, got a beard
