God has blessed Mike Johnson, hasn’t She?
Before House Speaker Mike Johnson was elected to public office, he was the dean of a small Baptist law school that didn’t exist.
The establishment of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law was supposed to be a capstone achievement for Louisiana College, which administrators boasted would “unashamedly embrace” a “biblical worldview.” Instead, it collapsed roughly a decade ago without enrolling students or opening its doors amid infighting by officials, accusations of financial impropriety and difficulty obtaining accreditation, which frightened away would-be donors.
There is no indication that Johnson engaged in wrongdoing while employed by the private college, now known as Louisiana Christian University. But as a virtually unknown player in Washington, the episode offers insight into how Johnson navigated leadership challenges that echo the chaos, feuding and hard-right politics that have come to define the Republican House majority he now leads.
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J. Michael Johnson Esq., as he was then known professionally, was hired in 2010 to be the “inaugural dean” of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, named for a Southern Baptist Convention luminary who was instrumental in the faith group’s turn to the political right in the 1980s. The board of trustees who brought Johnson onboard included Tony Perkins, a longtime mentor who is now the president of the Family Research Council in Washington, a powerhouse Christian lobbying organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-gay “hate group.”
About Judge Paul Pressler. Houston Chronicle [December 27, 2017]:
A former Texas justice and prominent conservative religious leader has been accused in a state court lawsuit of sexually abusing a Houston man for decades, starting when he was a teenager.
The lawsuit, filed in Harris County court, claims Paul Pressler III sexually assaulted Gareld Duane Rollins Jr. beginning in 1979, when Rollins was 14 and Pressler was a justice on Texas’ 14th Court of Appeals, and continuing until 2004.
Houston Chronicle [April 13, 2018]:
The list of men accusing a former Texas state judge and leading figure of the Southern Baptist Convention of sexual misconduct continues to grow.
In separate court affidavits filed this month, two men say Paul Pressler molested or solicited them for sex in a pair of incidents that span nearly 40 years. Those accusations were filed as part of a lawsuit filed last year by another man who says he was regularly raped by Pressler.
Pressler’s newest accusers are another former member of a church youth group and a lawyer who worked for Pressler’s former law firm until 2017.
The details are predictably salacious. The case was eventually dismissed as too old to pursue in court.
None of this was public in 2010 when Johnson’s job was to launch a law school named after Pressler who had paid Rollins $450,000 in a confidential 2004 settlement. It’s just that these things conform to a predictable pattern among so many whose eyes are very publicly on heaven while their hands are privately in people’s privates.
