New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recently told his email subscribers that the United States has a depraved culture because more teens are identifying as LGBTQ+. He recently shared one email with his subscribers with an image header labeling the message as a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) news alert. He expressed his worries that the American culture has fallen deeply since the United States’ founding in 1776 and he fears the country may be now beyond redemption and hanging by a thread. He mentioned about 1 in 4 high school students identifying as something other than straight, referencing a recent CDC statistic. However, Johnson may not realize that the reason why more youth identified as non-heterosexual in the CDC’s 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey was because it changed its questions on sexual identity. This survey has been updated several times since its first use in 1990. It now asks two new questions of students to describe their sexual identities: “I am not sure about my sexual identity (questioning),” or, “I describe my sexual identity in some other way.” Nevertheless, his email is just the latest example of his extensive anti-LGBTQ+ Christian Nationalist rhetoric. Johnson was elected by the GOP House caucus without an extensive review and vetting process of his past. Johnson’s rhetoric is setting him on a path to be the most vocal anti-LGBTQ+ House speaker in US history.
