Speaker Mike Johnson is another one of those so-called “Christians” who think the environment doesn’t matter because the faithful are going to be raptured. And his very own stepmother has blasted him for using religion as a shield to justify his indifference to environmental issues.

“It speaks to those religious beliefs,” Janis Gabriel told The Guardian. “‘Don’t take care of the environment because we have a finite amount of time here and God will take care of you.’ It’s crazy.”

Yup. Johnson is a real nudnick, but his father, Patrick was actually a useful human being. He was a former firefighter who cared about the environment. When Johnson was a lad of 12, Patrick nearly died in an industrial explosion. Johnson has even called his dad’s survival an “actual miracle” and claimed this inspired his “very deep faith,” LGBTQNation reports.

Johnson’s beliefs are weirdly circular, but apparently his “very deep faith,” doesn’t include the very nature we are destroying.

However, Gabriel says Johnson’s commitment to his dad (who died in 2016) was superficial. She noted that during his time as a state representative, Johnson ignored her and his father’s pleas to help stop the U.S. government from holding an open burn of munitions that were toxic and carcinogenic in their community.

Oh, c’mon. What’s a few carcinogens among friends? At least that’s generally how Republicans and the U.S. government usually think.

“His father and I went to him and said: ‘Mike, you need to get involved in this, this is really important. Your family really lives at ground zero,” Gabriel said. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”

“He just wasn’t interested. He had other things to do,” Gabriel said. “He was never interested in environmental things.” She added that he “basically shut us down” and it “blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort.”

How sad. Johnson isn’t just trying to repress LGBTQ+ people, he’s also helping to enable the continued destruction of the planet.

Johnson is firmly in the creationist camp and has continually claimed that human activities are not driving climate change. Gabriel believes this philosophy spurs his indifference to environmental issues. To their mindset, if you think the apocalypse is imminent and God ultimately determines the outcome, there’s no reason to put up a fight.

Of course what really worsens this situation is that Johnson represents the state of Louisiana, where drought, extreme heat, and wildfires, all driven by climate change have wrought havoc. We have lived in Louisiana and I can tell you, even though I live in the Central American tropics, the heat in that state is unrelenting and we spent a sweltering summer there. Many people have died due to the extreme heat last someone. Sadly, this includes one man, Ted Boykin, who died of heat stroke last July because his trailer had no air conditioning.

His sister, Sandy Boykin Hays knows where to put the blame — on elected officials who should have done better by their constituents.

“He was let down by the system,” she said. “And to them [in Washington], I’m sure they wouldn’t believe, even if it [climate change] was staring them in the face, because they’re rich. They have money. They don’t have to worry about air conditioning or where your next meal is coming from.”

This makes me wish Johnson could try to sleep in 104 heat, with humidity at nearly 100 percent at 4:00 a.m. at a rest area where trucks are gunning their engines on the asphalt. We did this and I can tell you that if hell is real this is it and these people deserve to feel it.

How sad for the people in Louisiana. They don’t deserve someone as backward as Johnson.