It has been firmly established that Speaker Mike Johnson is a lunatic extremist Christian supremacist who holds views that are repellent to all good and normal people. He holds views repellent to most Christians.
This family is not the evangelicals next door who are kind of weird, and you definitely don’t want to be best friends, but they’re nice enough and you’d trust them to watch your house while you were out of town. This is the extremist sleeper cell next door that all the neighbors avoid, but gossip about endlessly. If they come outside, the neighbors go in.
Recently, it was revealed that Johnson and his son either are or recently were each other’s porn cops, i.e. each got APB alerts from Covenant Eyes Christian anti-cumwhacking software if the other started looking at porn. This was discovered through some good old fashioned journalism, namely the kind where a person willingly sits through hours of Mike Johnson babbling to his church about how he and his son and the Lord work together to help Mike and Junior keep their hands off their respective wangpeeners. (His son was 17 at the time.)
If you’re not familiar with creepy evangelical subculture, this is even more horrifying than if you are, say, this particular writer, and were already familiar because you used to live in it. “Covenant Eyes LMAOOOOOOOOOOO,” we said to ourselves, because we already knew all about those freaks.
We also know all about the predatory fathers who go on dates with their young daughters like they’re going to the prom, so they can coerce them into promising they’ll never give their virginity away to anyone except the young man daddy gives them away as chattel to. They’re called purity balls, and surprise, Mike Johnson dated his teenage daughter at the purity ball!
This story was uncovered via the time-worn journalism strategy of watching hours of German television to see if Mike Johnson turns up dating his teenage daughter at the purity ball. And he did! And no, it was not on the German version of “To Catch A Predator.”
ABC News reports on the 2015 segment it found from Germany’s n-tv, wherein Johnson and his sicko wife openly talked about Daddy’s big date with his offspring, and how he got her to sign the certificate promising not to break her dad’s heart by fucking.
"This looks like a wedding," a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. "But they are not bride and groom -- but rather father and ... daughter," the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.
If fundamentalist Christians created their own PornHub, this would be a category.
So anyway, things that should not look like weddings: that.
ABC News explains that the segment wasn’t just about Johnson and his date (his daughter), but also featured other grown men and their dates (their daughters). And yes, we are not kidding when we say the report featured Johnson’s daughter saying her promise-not-to-fuck vows, to Daddy.
The news segment […] features interviews with Johnson's daughter, who is now in her 20s, and shows her at the purity ball pledging to her father "to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children ... to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity," in between shots of Johnson nodding along in agreement.
That’s an “If you see something say something” situation if there ever was one.
In one brief interview clip, Johnson's wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, "We don't talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question."
Say you’re an unfit parent without saying you’re an unfit parent.
Oh wait, guess she did say it. (Lest anyone think it’s unfair for people to go after Kelly Johnson right along with her vile husband, she’s a willing accomplice in his public extremism and always has been.)
ABC News quotes an expert and author on evangelical abuse, an ex-vangelical herself (not a typo, that’s what they call ‘em), named Linda Kay Klein, who explains that purity balls aren’t that popular in the evangelical world — they’re really for an extremely extreme kind of extremist — but that there are other things in the wider “purity movement” that are more common, like “purity rings.” (Look up True Love Waits. No, not the Radiohead song, although the latter is an allusion to the former.)
Klein writes about the creepy sickness below the obvious sickness of dressing your daughter up like a princess and taking them for a formal night out — with other daddies and little princesses! — to proclaim your ownership over their bodies and sexuality. (As if that wasn’t sick enough.)
"In my book I talk about eternal girlhood," Klein said. "There's this way in which purity culture attempts to create this eternal girlhood among girls — you never really grow up, you never really have headship over your own life. You ultimately are there to be guided by and to support and to champion and to be led by somebody greater than you: a man."
"People often think about it from a purity ball perspective, like, 'Oh, that's creepy.' You've got the father with the daughter in a wedding-like ballgown," Klein said. "But I actually find myself also thinking about what that means when you have your headship transferred over to your husband and what the girl has internalized from that."
Our joke above about Daddy selling, we mean giving their daughters’ bodies away to one man they approve of? Not really a joke.
One more quote from the ABC News report:
"There are predators out there, and there are prey," Johnson, dressed in a tuxedo, said in an interview at the purity ball, adding that he hopes his daughter will "try and steer clear of the wolves like that."
Sounds like something a wolf might say.
[ABC News]
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
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San Francisco has been for many years a welcoming beacon for the refugees from toxic Christianity. Just throwing that out there to the Hannah Johnsons and Mary Ann Singletons of the country.
As the Black drag queen on the 7 MUNI bus once announced, "Okay, all of y'all, stop your complaining! You didn't come here from Ohio and Arkansas and Louisiana and wherever not to be around people! You came here to be part of a CITY! Now behave like it, and live it up!"
I’m glad we can dig up dirt on these people through the hardcore journalistic tactic of *checks notes* listening to what they’re saying out loud in front of everyone on the television.