New speaker's 'Stepford wife' has been quietly scrubbed from public scrutiny: column

What do you do with a wife who equates homosexuality with bestiality and subscribes to an antiquated anatomical philosophy in which a key player is phlegm? If you’re Mike Johnson, first you make a joke about her spending two weeks on her knees in prayer. Then you send her to Stepford.

Stepford in this case, as Salon senior Amanda Marcotte sees it, is an internet from which the House speaker’s wife Kelly Johnson has been quietly scrubbed. According to Marcotte, her life should be considered “fair game.”

“They spent years marketing their marriage for political and financial gain, weaponizing their supposed moral superiority to deny the rest of us basic rights,” she writes. “In realpolitik terms, it matters.”

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As proof, Marcotte points to reports that Kelly Johnson’s work as a Christian therapist and training she received from the National Christian Counselor's Association, which bases its teachings on Hippocrates, who as the name suggests, wasn’t clearing his findings with the American Psychological Association.

“These are famously the ideas that led medieval doctors to believe blood-letting would help cure illness,” she notes.

While Kelly Johnson's views remain unclear, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall notes a lot of her role on the couple's since-deleted podcast was agreeing with her husband, who has said gay sex should be criminalized and women who have abortions are to blame for Social Security cuts.

"If you were of a mind to have a stereotypical vision of Johnson's wife, as a kind of Stepford wife," Marshall said. “It’s that kinda thing.”

Marshall goes on to note that Johnson himself presents as “very smooth,” which he suggests is why the relatively unknown Louisiana representative was able to claim the speaker’s seat.

His values are extremist, but his manners are moderate, Marshall says. And like his wife, those values are ones Johnson would like to hide, argues Marcotte.

“Johnson's entire strategy from the second the GOP conference voted for him as their leader has been to do whatever he can to conceal his past and his views from the public eye,” she writes, “because he knows the more voters learn about him, the more they will reject him.”

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The person who will find it difficult to reject Johnson is his wife, whose “covenant marriage” license that makes divorce near impossible, she writes.

“[It] illustrates for people why he's so determined to use state power to police other people's sex lives,” she writes. “Sincerity isn't the point — justifying their will to dominate others is.”