Tomorrow is my birthday, and I want to thank voters in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and even my home state of New Jersey for giving me an early present when they overwhelmingly voted against the GOP’s efforts to turn the clocks back to before I was born.
Ohio voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution; Virginia Democrats swept the legislature, defeating conservative candidates who had promised to enact Governor Glenn Youngkin’s far right agenda; Pennsylvanians added a Democrat to their Supreme Court after a heated and very expensive election; and New Jersey Democrats held the Senate and gained five seats in the assembly despite loud debates about sex education in schools.
I was not watching these elections as carefully as many, so I want to share some of the analysis that made me smile after last Tuesday.
The first post-election headline for Abortion, Every Day was simply, “Fuck You, We Win.” In the article, Jessica Valenti writes:
I cannot begin to tell you the amount of joy it brought me to find out a little after midnight last night that Democrats gained control of the Virginia legislature. Because not only did it mean that abortion access would remain relatively safe in the state—but that the multi-million dollar bet anti-abortion groups made on their much-touted strategy failed spectacularly…. These people spent months training candidates to claim that bans aren’t bans, and to attack their opponents for abortion ‘extremism.’ Quite a nervy message considering voters can see with their own eyes which party is forcing women into septic shock!
Another Jessica—my friend and former colleague at Rewire News Group, Jessica Mason Pieklo—noted that in the Dobb’s decision Justice Samuel Alito justified screwing everyone with a uterus by saying women are not without political power to change things in our society. In her weekly newsletter the Fallout, she writes:
This week’s wins mean that in every election since the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion “to those legislative bodies,” the anti-choice movement has been trounced at the polls. From Kansas to Montana to Ohio and beyond, all abortion rights do is win (cue DJ Khaled). In overturning Roe, Alito and his fellow conservatives explained that their decision “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” Hey Sam, how’s that working out for you and your anti-choice buddies now?
There was good news outside of abortion victories as well. Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning, who tracks issues impacting the trans community, celebrated that anti-trans candidates and Moms For Liberty were big losers in elections across the country. She pointed to a school board election in Albemarle County, Virginia in which Meg Scalia Bryce, who ran on an anti-trans and anti-CRT platform, lost. (If the name didn’t give it away, Meg is the daughter of the late SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia.)
Also in Virginia, Democrats swept every seat on the Fairfax County school board in what was seen as a test of an anti-trans “parental rights” strategy. Democrats also swept the Central Bucks School Board in the most expensive school board election of all time. The district has been battling book banning and anti-trans policies this year, and $600,000 was spent on this divisive race. Thankfully, book banning was also a losing strategy in Pella, Iowa, a town that Reed notes voted +35 for Trump in 2020. A fight over the book Gender Queer (the library chose to keep it) ended in a ballot initiative designed to give county officials control of books in the library. The initiative did not pass.
Reed writes:
While political analysts have largely centered their post-election discussions on the influence of abortion rights, the significant role of LGBTQ+ rights in the 2023 elections has not received its due attention. Overlooking the sweeping defeats of anti-trans candidates at the local level and the surge of voter turnout driven by student-led organizers would be to overlook a pivotal narrative of the 2023 elections—a narrative that could carry profound implications into 2024. For the students and transgender youth witnessing the downfall of numerous anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ figures, the sense of relief is palpable and undeniable.
This is all great news and restores my faith in humanity just a little bit. When people are given the opportunity to vote on these issues, sanity prevails. People want access to abortion, they want their kids to have access to books, they don’t want schools censoring LGBTQ+ information, and they don’t want politicians to pick on trans kids. Phew.
Unfortunately, my relief will be short-lived because there’s a non-zero chance that by my next birthday Donald Trump has been elected again. Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner summed up my fears about it beautifully in an essay on Steady. They explain that Trump and his colleagues have made it clear—in writing—that they plan to use the Justice Department to get revenge on anyone who didn’t support them in overturning the 2020 elections. Their explicit goal is to make sure that we don’t all have the opportunity to vote on these issues moving forward.
Rather and Kirschner write:
This is not simply an election between a Democrat and a Republican or an incumbent and a challenger. This is not primarily about weighing polls and voter enthusiasm in battleground states. This should not be reduced to comparing advertising dollars or voter registration numbers. This is about a vote that will decide the future of our nation in ways unlike any since the Civil War.
I’m not ready to even think about the possibility of losing that election. So, I won’t, at least not until after I blow out my birthday candles.
P.S. I’m going to take next week off to get ready for Thanksgiving. I’m not the chef in this house, but I do have a lot of cleaning to do before the guests arrive.
Mike Johnson Is Weirder Than We All Thought
Until a few weeks ago, no one knew much about Mike Johnson because he was an unremarkable benchwarmer in the GOP House lineup. His unlikely jump to team captain, however, has changed that, and his beliefs are now under a lot of scrutiny. Most of what has been uncovered is to be expected of a man who describes himself as a “Bible-believing” “pro-life” Christian, but some of it is odd, some of it is creepy, and none of it makes me feel any better about the fact that he’s just two heartbeats from the presidency.
He flies a Christian Nationalist Flag in front of his office: This flag—which is white with an evergreen tree in the middle and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” across the bottom—was first flown in the Revolutionary War. It has since been adopted by a group called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) which believes that the U.S. is—and should be—a Christian society and that Christians should control all aspects of it. The NAR is a big supporter of Donald Trump despite the fact that as a thrice married man who knocked up wife one while still married to wife two and slept with a porn star while wife three was home with their infant son, he doesn’t immediately strike one as an icon for Christian values. Many Trump supporters carried this flag when they stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
He most definitely does not fly a rainbow flag: His views on sexual orientation have been widely reported. He has called homosexuality “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous” and argued in favor of laws criminalizing homosexual behavior. In the early 2000s, he worked with the “conversion therapy” group Exodus International on their Day of Truth which was created to counter GLSEN’s Day of Silence. The Day of Truth promoted the ex-gay movement and promised people they could pray away the gay and be happily heterosexual forever. Exodus International has since shut down. Its leader acknowledged that he was still gay and apologized for the pain the group had caused over the years. Johnson, in contrast, has stuck to his anti-LGBTQ roots, proposing a national version of the “Don’t Say Gay Law” called the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act which would prohibit teaching sexual orientation, gender identity, and “transgenderism” to children under 10.
He likely thinks birth control causes abortion: We know that’s not how it f**king works, but when Johnson worked as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, he argued that IUDs and other birth control methods caused abortions. In a recent Fox News interview—in which the interchangeable blonde host admitted that being against contraception was not in line with the American public—Johnson denied allegations that he had voted against access to contraception and fertility treatment. Or at least he said he didn’t really remember doing so.
He and his wife will never ever ever not be together: He doesn’t appear to call his wife “Mother,” but he and Kelly are in strict covenant marriage. The covenant marriage movement was an attempt by conservatives—who blamed everything from poverty to low graduation rates on the “destruction of the family”—to make it harder to get a divorce. Supporters of covenant marriage, including Mike Huckabee and the Duggars, have argued that modern “no fault” divorce laws are to blame for our moral decline and offer this as an alternative. Couples entering into a covenant marriage must do counseling with a clergy or therapist ahead of time and sign a contract that only allows for divorce when one partner commits adultery, abuses their spouse or children, uses alcohol or drugs to excess, or commits a felony. While the movement had hoped to become popular nationwide, only three states ever passed such laws.
He’s living the Blind Side: Mike and Kelly have four biological children and a son they refer to as “adopted” who joined their family as a troubled 14-year-old. It has the hallmarks of a sweet story as the son has said that if the Johnson’s hadn’t taken him in, he would probably have ended up in jail. Still, something feels off (especially given new revelations about the Blind Side family). For one thing, the son is also named Michael and for another he’s only 11 years younger than Johnson himself. While Johnson has said he adopted the younger Michael, he later admitted that they hadn’t done it officially because the adoption process is a lot of work. Moreover, Michael has been relatively quiet about Johnson’s political career and newfound success.
Of course, what gets the most attention is that Michael is Black. In the past, Johnson has said that raising both a Black son and white son taught him a little bit about privilege. In an interview with PBS he said, “They have different challenges. My son Jack has an easier path. He just does.” His GOP-colleagues were not happy with anything that smacked of admitting to structural racism, and now that he’s a star-player, Johnson has walked it back. In a recent Fox News interview, he said this instead, “And I’m not so sure it was all about skin color, but it is about culture and society. Michael, our first, came from a really troubled background and had a lot of challenges.”
His teenage son is his porn accountability partner. And now for the creepy. Like many conservative Christians and those observing No Nut November, Johnson blames pornography for many of our society ills (whatever divorce didn’t cause, I suppose). To make sure that he doesn’t partake, Johnson has said he uses an app called Covenant Eyes which scans your phone for “inappropriate” content and rats you out to an accountability partner. Wired referred to this as one example of “antiporn shameware” which has become a multimillion-dollar business used by groups like Promise Keepers. (I’m still fascinated by how concerned these men’s groups are with whether and when their members wiggle their willies.) Accountability partners keep each other on track. While most people use a church member or friend as an accountability partner, Johnson chose his 17-year-old son, Jack.
This means that Jack is being constantly surveilled by a dad who knows everything the kid has ever searched up on Safari. That wouldn’t just stop him from accessing porn, but likely from getting legitimate information about any number of things his father would find objectionable, which as far as I can tell is everything. I just don’t think parents should be this far into their kids’ business. It offers the same creep factor as Purity Balls in which dads and daughters exchange rings and vows of chastity until marriage, and then the dad takes the ring off at her wedding to signal …what exactly? “It’s now okay for you to f**k my daughter?”Accountability in reverse is equally creepy. If Mike were to visit Porn Hub in a moment of weakness, an alert would pop up on his son’s phone. And then what? Jack goes to him and says “Come on dad, Catholic school girl lesbian porn again? Can’t you be more creative? Have you ever heard of furries?”
Also, can we also discuss the potential security risk of the Speaker of the House having commercial surveillance software on his phone?
Saturday Night Live referred to Mike Johnson as having been created by AI, and he may well have been. His views are extreme but not at all surprising. Chat GPT could have easily predicted them. Well, maybe not the son-as-porn-accountability-partner—that’s just too weird for median-seeking algorithms. Or anybody, really.
I laughed at the idea of Mike Johnson being created by AI. It may be true!
A lot to celebrate but still such a long way to go...thanks for a great article.