I grew up with two older brothers who loved collecting comics, and as the youngest, I often grabbed their cast-offs and spent hours reading about superheroes, villains, and vampires. One of their favorite publications was the DC Bizarro World comic series, which told tales of a backward world created by a deformed clone of Superman known as “Bizarro.”

I’m beginning to think that the GOP has become a deformed clone of its former self and that we’ll all be pulled into their Bizzaro World with the recent appointment of Mike Johnson as speaker of the House.

After 22 days of bickering, in-fighting, and voting other candidates off the island, the House GOP finally elected the previously little-known Louisiana congressman to the Speaker’s seat. All 220 House Republicans unanimously cast their votes for Johnson, who needed a 215-vote majority. However, there is little cause for celebration here as the Republican party is backing in unison a far-right, Trump-supporting theocrat who is anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, and represented a museum that claims dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark.

Prior to winning Louisiana’s 4th congressional district seat in 2017, Johnson worked as the senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), designated a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center. The ADF is an ultra-conservative “Christian” legal advocacy group that seeks to inject “Christian” practices into government and public schools as well as to deny LGBTQ basic human rights and, of course, outlaw abortion. While working for the ADF, Johnson stated that homosexuals are “sinful” and “destructive” and argued that supporting gays will lead to widespread pedophilia and that gay sex should be illegal.

Johnson openly celebrated the reversal of Roe v. Wade, calling it “a historic and joyful day”. He has also co-sponsored bills for a nationwide abortion ban, has blamed abortions for school shootings, and has accused Planned Parenthood of chopping up baby body parts. In a video clip that surfaced last week, Johnson urged Republicans to cut social programs for expectant mothers, claiming that if American women had more babies that would grow up to be workers, then Republicans wouldn’t have to cut Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Although many may not know this, John was the primary force behind the amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to throw out the 2020 election results in four swing states won by Biden: Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Johnson also wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, is an advocate of Covenant marriage (a “Christian idea” making it harder for women to divorce their husbands), and is an ardent climate change denier. He stated that climate change-driven weather patterns are just part of “natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history”. Not surprising comments since Johnson’s biggest donors are oil companies.

To top things off, Johnson once funded and was the lawyer for Ark Encounter, a creation museum in Kentucky that sued the state (and won!) for public tax credits to build the project in 2014. Several exhibits at the “museum” claim that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark, that there were only 1,400 animal “kinds” on the Ark, and that the idea that the earth is 6 thousand years old is a fact and biblically solid. 

Johnson has argued that student prayer and teaching “Christian” beliefs in schools is protected under the First Amendment, and he’s a believer in “Young Earth Creationism” which states that the universe is 6,000 years old.

The man behind the attempt to derail our democracy by nullifying a free and fair election in favor of a would-be dictator has been elected Speaker. A white male theocrat who is openly hostile to the LGBTQ community and women, who wants to gut Medicare and Social Security, outlaw gay marriage, and believes in Creationism is just two steps away from the Presidency: And what’s worse is that each and every Republican in the House voted for him.

We are truly living in Bizzaro World.