It has long been a tactic of the lunatic fringe on the political right to blame tragedy on things they oppose. But most of the time, the ones guilty of saying such things are people outside of government.
We famously had religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame natural disasters on homosexuality. We’ve had right-wing pundits claim that “taking God out of schools” is to blame for everything from failing grades to failed marriages.
But now the man who’s second in line to the presidency after the Vice President is on video saying that mass shootings are the product of divorce and abortion.
After the mass shooting in Maine this week that killed 18 and wounded 13 more, comments made by Louisiana’s Mike Johnson from a few years back have resurfaced. And what’s most troubling about these comments is that they didn’t come from some old decrepit Southern Baptist fire-and-brimstone megachurch preacher. They came from a young man — younger then than I am now — who practices what he calls “legal ministry.”
He told a congregation in his home state just 7 years ago that mass shootings come from no-fault divorce, feminism, abortion, and everything else that you might hear from Oral Roberts or Mark Driscoll as the reasons for the downfall of America.
“The countercultural revolution. Woodstock and drugs and free love and all that. More about the undermining of the foundations of faith and morality. In the late ‘60s we invented things like no-fault divorce laws, the sexual revolution. We invented radical feminism. We invented legalized abortion in 1973.
We know that we’re living in a completely amoral society. People say how can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates? Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple of generations of Americans, that there is no right and wrong, that it’s survival of the fittest, and you evolved from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed?”
“Primordial slime”? It seems Johnson is even blaming the teaching of evolution for the murder of our children.
It couldn’t be the guns, of course. Not one Republican in America will ever admit that there is a problem with guns in this country. Johnson has voted against any kind of gun control his entire political career, including a measure passed last year that expanded background checks, provided grants for crisis-intervention laws, and funded mental health services.
ANY gun control, to them, is total gun control, despite the fact that a vast majority of America favors the very things that Johnson has voted against.
Watch his fiery 2016 sermon here: