Mike Johnson declared 2023’s “most disturbing” Christian nationalist
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In a scathing op-ed, LGBTQ Nation Heroes nominee Melissa Gira Grant urges us to ask ourselves how we didn't see someone like Johnson coming...
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This has always been the fear I hold... Politics has always been full of ugly loud-mouths like Trump, MTG, and Boebert. They're dangerous but manageable because they're generally kinda stupid and can't keep their mouth shut- you can hear them coming from ten miles away and most reasonable people just work around them.
No, the most dangerous ones are always going to be the quiet ones, the ones that can sit and smile without saying a word, completely uncontroversial, while their hands are at work unravelling the knots of civil liberties under the table where you can't see them until it's too late. That's one of the reasons I never did want to see Trump leave office during his 4 years- not because I liked him (far from it), but because I feared seeing Mike Pence, the quiet, uncontroversial Christian, take a seat in the oval office much more than Trump's bumbling egotism.
And Johnson, being a completely uncontroversial nobody that was unknown to the media until now, is the exact kind of "sit-and-smile" quiet that is very, very dangerous.
Pence was far from uncontroversial in Indiana before running for VP. The whole gerrymandered red state hated him as governor. If anyone saw him as uncontroversial they weren't paying attention. Which is kind of the point of the article, I guess.
I suppose he was controversial, but to the rest of us outside Indiana we never got any of that from the news supercycle. More focusing on his time as actual VP when he became more relevant to national politics, it was very easy for him to stay in the shadows of the Tornado de la Trump.
Really? Because as a queer Ohioan I knew damn well to be afraid of “aids resurgence pence”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ we just run in different news circles. i'm out on the west coast
Fair enough. Well, pence’s major legacy as governor of Indiana is that he brought HIV back by killing a needle exchange program that had been wildly successful. In many states and times that would be a bad idea, but in Indiana in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s it was obviously going to have that exact effect. Indiana is like Michigan if Republicans singlehandedly ran the recovery from the collapse of the American auto industry. In short It’s depressing on a level hard to sufficiently express (though I’ll reluctantly admit they’re kicking our asses on renewable energy). But yeah in short he picked one of the worst times and places to kill a lifesaving program just to punish addicts and it hurt more than just addicts
Did Pence also advocate for electric-shock "conversation therapy" while Governor?