Speaker Mike Johnson: Making America Straight — Or At least Closeted — Again*

Christ Ministering to the Homosexuals in Salt Lake City, Watercolor, 51" x 43", 1996, Richard J Van Wagoner, Courtesy of Van Wagoner Family Trust.**

Human Rights Campaign’s recent ROUNDUP summarizes Speaker Mike Johnson’s decades-long devotion to merging his extremist visions of religion and government, his sanctimonious dedication to preventing, curtailing, and reversing the expansion of civil and human rights to historically marginalized groups and to dehumanizing LGBTQ+ people, restricting bodily autonomy, undermining democracy and, of course, making certain even the most dangerous individuals have unfettered access to machines designed for killing large numbers of people within seconds.

Twenty-five years ago last month, on October 6, 1998, a time MAGA Mike Johnson pines for the country’s return, Matthew Shepard was tortured and left for dead. That hate crime was only slightly more horrific and primitive than the religiously inspired ‘therapy’ advocated by the likes of the new speaker to ‘cure’ the ‘serious social and moral scourge of homosexuality.’

Should it surprise anyone that official marginalization does little to discourage and much to encourage unofficial physical, emotional, and social violence against the marginalized?

The year after Matthew Shepard’s murder — and six years after my parents came out as the mother and father of a gay child to their gay son on his 22nd birthday — my visual artist…