“I would have to quit,” he said.
Ashcroft raises an interesting point. New House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), for example, said in a Fox News interview: “‘What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it — that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe, and so I make no apologies for it.”
Johnson swore an oath to a Constitution that includes a First Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The Constitution bans slavery and cruel and unusual punishment; the Bible condones slavery and stoning, among other things. Which is his rule book: the Constitution or the Bible? He should tell us.
This is more than theoretical. The Supreme Court (for now) has ruled same–sex marriage is constitutionally protected. Johnson, however, makes no bones about his anti-gay bigotry. He has condemned homosexuality in print multiple times. Can he set aside his religious views and accept that gay marriage is the law of the land? His oath requires him to.
His anti-gay advocacy was infamous. “In the early 2000s, Johnson worked as an attorney and spokesperson for the evangelical Christian legal group Alliance Defense Fund, now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom. For decades, ADF — designated a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a designation the Arizona-based group disputes — spearheaded legal efforts to criminalize same-sex sexual activity, block efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, allow for businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people, and ban transgender people from using restrooms that correspond with their gender identities,” NBC News reported. “During his ADF tenure, Johnson sued the city of New Orleans in 2003 on behalf of the group over a local law that gave health care benefits to the partners of gay city workers.” He also wrote an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas, arguing that states can criminalize same-sex sexual conduct.
So the question remains for him and others who cite the Bible as their “rule book”: Will they follow the Constitution when it’s in conflict with their religious views? If not, they should follow Ashcroft’s statement and resign. Officeholders might take an oath on the Bible (or other text), but they take an oath to the Constitution, which, unsurprisingly, contradicts the Bible in many significant respects. You cannot have two rule books if you are to abide by your oath.
Ashcroft and Johnson have been more candid than most, but, to a frightening degree, the Republican Party has become a vessel for White Christian nationalism, which seeks to impose “a worldview that claims the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the country’s laws should therefore be rooted in Christian values,” as NPR put it. (According to the American Values Survey, 75 percent of Republicans believe the Founding Fathers “intended it to be a Christian nation with western European values.”) That belief is the foundation for effectively obliterating the anti-establishment clause and for a host of views on immigration (the “great replacement theory”), abortion, gay rights, education and more.
All Americans are absolutely entitled to adhere to the worldview that the United States was founded as a Christian nation to defend Western values. However, when they take an oath of office to defend and protect a Constitution that is incompatible with that deeply held view, pluralistic democracy has a serious problem.
There are two ways to resolve the issue. Ashcroft presents one: Resign if you cannot put your religious views aside. The other is to admit that you must put those views aside to hold public office. When the issue is not evangelical Christianity, but rather John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism or Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, politicians have taken pains to assure voters that their religion would not dictate their actions in office. We should expect no less of today’s elected officials, including Johnson.
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