Johnson fundraising email raises concerns over number of LGBTQ youths

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in a fundraising email sent Sunday said he worries that too many high school students are identifying as LGBTQ and “America may be beyond redemption.”

“1 in 4 high school students identifies as something other than straight,” Johnson wrote in the email, first obtained by Punchbowl News. “What are they being taught in school?”

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released earlier this year found that more than 25 percent of high school students in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ, up from 11 percent in 2015. The report used data from 2021, the most recent year for which it is available.

A February Gallup poll similarly found that a record 7.2 percent of the nation’s adult population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or “something other than heterosexual,” including nearly 20 percent of adult members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2004.

Johnson in the fundraising email, which was sent via the National Republican Campaign Committee, said the country is “hanging on by a thread.”

“Our culture has fallen so far since the founding of our country, and it’s just getting worse,” he wrote. He later characterized a drop in church attendance over the past several decades as “frightening” and said, “God is mocked openly in the public square.”

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Johnson, who was elected Speaker unanimously by Republicans in October, has come under fire for his past views and actions on LGBTQ rights.

As an attorney and former spokesperson for the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson authored op-eds that advocated for the criminalization of gay sex and suggested legalizing same-sex marriage could lead to people marrying their pets.

Johnson, who has served in the House since 2016, last year introduced legislation criticized by LGBTQ rights advocates as a national version of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, known to its opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. He later co-sponsored legislation to bar transgender women and girls from competing on female school sports teams and has railed against gender-affirming health care in committee hearings.

He is one of more than 40 Republican co-sponsors on a bill to ban gender-affirming health care for transgender minors nationwide.

“Let’s face it — we live in a depraved culture,” Johnson wrote in Sunday’s email. “I didn’t want to believe it at first, but I fear God may allow our nation to enter into a time of judgment for our collective sins.”

“America needs to recognize that we have much to repent for if we want to avoid the judgment we so clearly deserve,” Johnson added, “but that starts with returning America to God’s good graces once again.”

Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement on Tuesday, Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ civil rights group, denounced Johnson’s efforts to fundraise “off of his virulently anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” and criticized Johnson for speaking at a National Association of Christian Lawmakers event over the weekend.

The group aims to “restore the Judeo-Christian foundation” of the U.S., according to a mission statement posted to its website. Its policy priorities include abolishing abortion and “restoring marriage between one man and one woman.”

“House Speaker Mike Johnson, the man second in line to the presidency, is busy leading a parade of hate across the country rather than doing his job,” Robinson said Tuesday. “His obsession with extremely anti-LGBTQ+ law and policy and his desperation to impose that agenda on the nation are a stain on the GOP and all those who supported him.”