Mike Johnson—Who Monitors Porn Intake With Son—Has a History of Odd Fights With Adult Businesses

Shortly after Mike Johnson was elected House Speaker (after weeks of reality TV-level chaos), social media users resurfaced a 2022 video of Johnson speaking to Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church about masturbation. In the video, he promotes an “accountability software” called Covenant Eyes that monitors phones and devices for porn consumption and, as Johnson put it, “sends a report to your accountability partner.” His “accountability partner,” he revealed, is his teenage son. “If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice,” Johnson told the church. “I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”

It was weird! It still is weird! And, as it turns out, it’s part of Johnson’s history taking up odd fights with the adult industry during the time he worked as an attorney at the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. Conservatives being anti-sex isn’t exactly breaking news here, but you have to gawk a bit at Johnson’s particular commitment to ensuring no one gets off on his watch.

Court documents reviewed by Jezebel show that in 2005, Johnson represented three Tuscon, Arizona, residents who tried to stop an adult business from opening a storefront unless under 25% of its products were “adult materials.” I guess a quarter of your merchandise comprising dildos and adult magazines is perfectly standard fare, but 26 or 25.5% was where Johnson’s clients drew the line.

The residents argued such a store would harm the community. One of them owned a dance studio in the same plaza where the adult store would open and argued it would affect her business. Ultimately, the store never opened—the business, Metro Concepts, cited the country’s “burdensome regulations”—and the case was dismissed.

But then, in 2008, a client of Johnson became involved in a legal dispute over advertising for an adult business in an Ohio-based local paper called City Beat. After City Beat sold ads to people involved in sex work, Citizens for Community Values—a far-right Christian group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group—began a letter-writing campaign against the paper, prompting City Beat’s parent company, Lightborne Publishing, to sue the group for damages. The group turned to Alliance Defending Freedom for representation, provided by none other than Mike Johnson.

Per the lawsuit, reviewed by Jezebel, City Beat sought “monetary damages in the amount of lost advertising revenue and business revenue” from Citizens for Community Values’ “campaign to violate the paper’s civil rights and tortious interference with its business relationships.” The case was ultimately dismissed, and, more recently, Citizens for Community Values changed its name to the Center for Christian Virtue in 2021. The group now seems to devote most of its time to fighting trans kids and abortion rights activists in the state. Similarly, in the years since working on these cases, Johnson continued his decorated legal career advocating for anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ extremists, eventually running for office in Louisiana state politics, making it to the U.S. House of Representatives, and being elected Speaker in November. It seems pretty contradictory that someone so performatively obsessed with protecting free speech would devote this much time and energy to advocating for clients trying to censor adult businesses.

As recently as 2022, Johnson’s remained touchy about porn and adult businesses, at least to the point that he openly boasted about mutually monitoring porn consumption with his then-17-year-old son. As Rolling Stone reported in November when Johnson’s remarks were recirculated on social media, if Johnson and his son are still, err, holding each other “accountable” with Covenant Eyes installed on his phone, this could pose an ever-greater security threat now that Johnson is Speaker. After all, it’s a third-party tech company that—as Johnson put it—“scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you.” Johnson is second-in-line for the presidency and a “porn detox” app may or may not have access to everything on his phone. Cool!

I don’t know if it’s possible for any politician to be ~normal~ about porn, whatever that entails. I guess one normal thing they could do is not broadcast that they and their son track each other’s porn habits. But on top of vigilantly working overtime to excise all porn from his and his son’s lives, Johnson’s professional history implies a more contentious relationship with porn and sex work than what I, at least, am used to seeing from public figures. Given everything on his plate right now, including at least a few House Republicans eying his potential removal for being forced to be vaguely reasonable, I hope he finds something to take the edge off.