The older I get, the more reminders I see that Maya Angelou was right: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Take the new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, for example.

He has been showing who he is since 1998, when he graduated from law school and began pursuing every possible opportunity for the LGBTQ+ community. And I’m not just talking about trying to stop gay marriage, because let’s face it, a lot of progressives were against it at the time too. But Johnson was extreme by comparison, advocating laws banning two adults from having consensual sex in their own home.

So anyone who considers themselves an ally to the LGBTQ+ community knows this:

S

Gay marriage and other protections are not safe.

Johnson

(R-La.)

has made attacking the queer community a large part of his life’s work. We don’t yet know his style as a leader in the house, but we do know exactly where he wants to go.

And judging by how the speaker selection process played out in the weeks that followed

the expulsion of

Representative Kevin McCarthy

(R-Bakersfield)

the Republican Party seems more than willing to join him in going after the queer community. Of the three speaker nominations

before before

Johnsons, the fastest to collapse was that of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer

of Minnesota

. It took barely four hours. One of the key issues raised by his opposition: his support for same-sex marriage.

I told him it wasn’t between him and me, said Rep. Rick Allen (R-Ga.)

of Georgia

about why he was against Emmer. It was between him and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

For some reason I don’t think Allen’s love meant your neighbor as yourself.

No, conservatives like him and Johnson tend to use Christianity as a justification for anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. However, the powerful players within this huge wing of the Republican Party do not seem to have any major problems with other sins, such as adultery.

Author Jeff Sharlet has written several books about the inner workings of a collective of powerful Republican politicians, some of whom share a Washington mansion where not only prayer groups but also apparent extramarital affairs took place. The New Yorker called it a dorm for Jesus. It takes a very special reading of the Bible to land gays in jail and at the same time extramarital affairs are okay.

The Family, as the group is known, is also linked to the passage of anti-gay legislation in Romania and Uganda, which now sentences LGBTQ+ people to death and jails anyone who fails to report a queer person to the government .

I’m not sure how the fiscally conservative, socially liberal crowd will digest all this information in the 2024 election, especially when there is a promise of tax cuts, combined with the unsavory discrimination. But given how this country continues to struggle with not only LGBTQ+ rights, but also racial and gender equality, I’m not too optimistic.

In 2021, not long after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Johnson gave a lecture to a group of congressional staffers as part of the Faith and Law lecture series. The bipartisan organization is like a think tank for Christians working on the Hill. Johnson, a Trump ally who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, listed the rule of law second among his seven core conservative principles.

He listed individual freedom and limited government first and third, despite wanting laws banning sex between two consenting adults in their own homes.

Besides his mundane doublespeak, the sentence that most caught my attention was this: I’m doing the same thing I did in the late 1990s.

Remember, he graduated from law school in 1998. That’s also the year a young gay man in Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, was brutally beaten, tied to a fence and left to die. That tragic story dominated the news for months. And Johnson began his legislative crusade against LGBTQ+ people in the wake of that tragedy.

That’s what Johnson did in the late 1990s. He may not be a household name yet, but he’s not unknown either. He showed us exactly who he was the first time.

So take Maya Angelous’ advice and believe him.

@LZGranderson