Yes, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is anti-gay, opposed decriminalizing gay sex and opposed same-sex marriage. It’s also true that polls show many or most Republicans now disagree with him on these issues (55% of Republicans supported marriage equality in 2021 per Gallup, falling back to 49% in 2023 amid unease over bio males in women’s sports/locker rooms and schools pushing trans identities on gender-nonconforming kids, which, for some, seemed to confirm “slippery slope” fears). Nevertheless, the GOP was hijacked by 8 House members of the ultra-MAGA variety, and they were able to force their will on the Republican’s slim majority because the Speaker must be elected by a majority of the House (not the party) and Democrats were all no votes against any Republican.
If a handful of Democrats had bucked their party’s top-down lock-step tactics and chosen just not to be present for the House vote that ousted the more moderate (certainly on culture-war issues) Kevin McCarthy, then McCarthy could have kept a majority of the House without the 8 insurgents. But that’s not how the game is played in Washington.
Here’s an interesting X thread discussing the awful situation of the Republicans held captive by the anti-gay right (again, a minority of today’s GOP), while the Democrats are captive of the LGBTQ gender ideologues (trans the kids, no guardrails) left.
.Exactly.
— Robert Valpy 🇨🇦 (@CosmicBob11) October 26, 2023
This is why we need to cut the woke nonsense, and unite as one gay community and go back to what we were fighting for in the early 2000s. Most Americans, even many Republicans would support that movement for basic equal rights, and nothing more.
But we are stuck in…