New House Speaker Mike Johnson came under fire over the weekend from activists on the Left for his opposition to pornography and for his support for accountability software, with a new Rolling Stone magazine report calling it a “creepy” action for the “faith-obsessed” representative.
The Rolling Stone headline reads “Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Intake in Resurfaced Video,” even though Johnson himself never said in the video clip quoted in the story that he viewed pornography.
In the clip, Johnson acknowledges he uses Covenant Eyes, a software that has been used by more than 1 million people to not only block porn but also to send what is called an accountability report to a partner.
“It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you,” Johnson says in the clip, which has more than 500,000 views on X, formerly Twitter.
COMPROMISE ALERT: Speaker Mike Johnson uses software Covenant Eyes (learned about at a Promise Keepers retreat) that scans all his electronic devices & gives a weekly report an "accountability partner" his 17 yr old son (so basically don't watch porn or your son/dad will know😬) pic.twitter.com/SSWpB9IIDB
— Receipt Maven (@receiptmaven) October 31, 2023
“It sends a report to your accountability partner,” he added. “So my accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report of all the things that are on our phones or all of our devices once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”
The Rolling Stone story criticized the “creepy Big Brother-ness of it all” and called Johnson a “faith-obsessed … far-right Christian nationalist.”
The Rolling Stone tweet about the story has been viewed 15 million times.
“This is creepy!” one person wrote.
“Why are these people so weird,” another person wrote.
But Johnson had plenty of defenders.
“What a gross way to frame a story about two men who have apps to block porn from their devices,” wrote Joel Berry, managing editor of The Babylon Bee.
“Of all the things Mike Johnson may promote, Christian antiporn accountability software may sound fundy & weird to outsiders, but it's both mainstream & commonsense for folks who believe porn is cancer & addiction is rampant,” wrote sociologist Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma.
Denny Burk, director of the Center for Gospel and Culture at Boyce College in Louisville, Ky., criticized the framing of the story.
“There is no evidence in the video that either Johnson or his son have ANY porn intake’ at all. Indeed, Johnson reports the opposite -- that there is a ‘clean slate,’” Burk wrote. “So why a headline about ‘porn intake’ when the video indicates that they don’t look at porn at all? We know why. Because Rolling Stone isn’t reporting but politicking. Readers need to know the difference.”
Photo Courtesy: @Getty Images/Alex Wong / Staff
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
