House Speaker Mike Johnson’s wife took down the website for her company, Onward Christian Counseling Services, a day after HuffPost pointed to documents on the site that compared homosexuality to bestiality and incest.
HuffPost reported Friday that Kelly Johnson, the wife of the Louisiana Republican and newly elected speaker, is owner and CEO of Onward Christian Counseling Services, which promotes Bible-based pastoral counseling. Her website featured a link to its 2017 operating agreement, which lays out the company’s corporate bylaws ― and states that the business is grounded in the belief that sex is offensive to God if it is not between a man and a woman married to each other.
It specifically puts gay, bisexual and transgender people in the same category as people who have sex with animals or family members, citing all of them as examples of “sexual immorality.”
“We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,” reads a passage from the eight-page business document.
This document also refers to “pre-born babies” and says that Onward Christian Counseling Services is committed to protecting all human life, “from conception through natural death.”
The website was live on Friday but had been pulled down by Saturday afternoon, according to metadata captured by the Wayback Machine, a service that archives internet sites.
Here’s a before-and-after comparison of the landing page for www.onwardchristiancounseling.org:
HuffPost pulled a copy of the 2017 operating agreement off the website before it was taken down. The agreement can be seen here.
The new House speaker and his wife have long worked together in their political and business lives. In the early 1990s, they were the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant law when they went on national television to endorse it. In the past couple of years, they have co-hosted a podcast called “Truth Be Told,” where they discuss politics and social issues from a conservative Christian perspective. They’ve done 69 episodes so far.
It’s not clear what level of involvement Speaker Johnson, who is a constitutional lawyer, may have had in drawing up the bylaws for his wife’s company. His signature appears on the last page of her business document. That’s because he served as its notary on July 1, 2017. But notaries are not required to read the documents they notarize.
More interestingly, the language that Kelly Johnson uses in the document is almost identical to the language laid out in a “model bylaws for churches” document created by Freedom Guard, a nonprofit group focused on “contending for the Christian faith through strategic litigation” and founded by Speaker Johnson.
In 2015, as Freedom Guard’s president and chief counsel, Johnson defended a creationist group that was trying to get tax incentives to build a Noah’s Ark-themed amusement park.
That same year, Johnson also offered free legal services to any public officials who felt it would “compromise their faith” to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court declared marriage equality the law of the land.
Freedom Guard’s website is currently inactive, too. The address www.freedomguardnow.org now redirects to a website about gambling laws, licensing and regulation.
A spokesperson for Speaker Johnson did not respond to a request for comment about whether he wrote the bylaws for his wife’s company that include the language about bestiality and incest, or if he knows why his wife’s website is now inactive.