International Courant
Newly elected Home Speaker Mike Johnson is a hardcore Christian nationalist who has a historical past of spouting excessive right-wing views — together with on mass shootings. The Louisiana Republican’s report on weapons has come beneath scrutiny within the wake of a shooter killing a minimum of 18 folks in Maine on Wednesday, and along with opposing gun management laws, the person who’s now second in line for the presidency has blamed mass shootings on each educating evolution and abortion.
Throughout a 2016 sermon on the Christian Middle in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson mentioned {that a} “sequence of cultural shifts” in the US — led by “elites” and “lecturers” within the Thirties who had been partaking with the theories of Charles Darwin — erased the affect of Christian considering and creationism from society.
“Folks say, ‘How can an adolescent go into their schoolhouse and open fireplace on their classmates?'” Johnson requested the viewers. “As a result of we have taught a complete era — a pair generations now — of People, that there is not any proper or unsuitable, that it is about survival of the fittest, and (that) you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that lifetime of any sacred worth? As a result of there’s no one sacred to whom it is owed. None of this could shock us.”
Johnson blaming college shootings on educating evolution was first recognized by Meidas Contact.
Earlier within the sermon, Johnson had mentioned the need of a creationist view of life. “If (the speculation of evolution) is true, there actually in all probability is not a God anyway, proper? There actually is not a creator,” Johnson mentioned. “So keep in mind when the founders mentioned ‘God’s up right here and he is transcendent and all males are down right here.’ Effectively (the teachers) simply erased God from the equation completely.” He mentioned that when there isn’t any creator, “then that implies that man will get to make all the selections,” and that the infiltration of this philosophy into authorities and colleges had begun to “educate a era of People that there actually is not any God, and there actually is not any proper and unsuitable.”
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Johnson has used an analogous argument guilty college shootings on abortion.
In 2015, Johnson, then a lawyer in Louisiana combating for elevated abortion restrictions, informed Irin Carmon of New York journal that “many ladies use abortion as a type of contraception, you realize, in sure segments of society, and it is simply surprising and unhappy, however that is the place we’re. While you break up the nuclear household, once you inform a era of those who life has no worth, no that means, that it is expendable, then you’ll wind up with college shooters.”
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Johnson’s spiritual fundamentalism has been an indicator of his life and profession. He is advocated for the return of prayer in public colleges, derided the “so-called separation of church and state” on the Home flooring, and argued that the nation’s founders didn’t set up the separation to stop faith from influencing authorities, however quite to impede the federal government from proscribing the affect and free train of faith.
The brand new Home Speaker can be a diehard Trump supporter who labored to overturn the 2020 election, and so it should not come as an enormous shock that he would not view the US as a democracy. Even Johnson as soon as mentioned, “We do not stay in a democracy, as a result of a democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner. It isn’t simply majority rule, it is a constitutional republic, and the founders set that up as a result of they adopted the biblical definition of what a civil society is meant to seem like.”
