The new speaker’s view is “the First Amendment for me but not for thee.”

The newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, J. Michael Johnson (R-La.), spent years as a practicing lawyer before his election to Congress in 2016, focusing in particular on free speech and free exercise of religion cases under the First Amendment.

Johnson’s hard-right political and religious views are well known. Johnson is an evangelical Christian who has condemned homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and called same-sex marriage “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” He served as spokesperson for the Alliance Defense Fund (now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom) whose website touts the “sanctity of life” and “the creative capacity of the union between a man and a woman.”

Less understood is Johnson’s litigation history, and what it suggests regarding his beliefs on the nature of individual rights under the U.S. Constitution and the role of religion in government. So I read about a dozen of the First Amendment cases he was involved in before he went into politics.