Creep of the House
By 
There are times when the word “cringe” seems grossly inadequate, and this is certainly one of them:
Years before Mike Johnson would ascend to No. 2 in the presidential line of succession, a German TV news outlet profiled the future speaker of the House and his then-teenage daughter.
“This looks like a wedding,” a news reporter says in German in a 2015 n-tv news segment that was unearthed by ABC News. “But they are not bride and groom — but rather father and … daughter,” the reporter adds, referring to Johnson and his then-13-year-old daughter, Hannah.
The German news segment documented Johnson and his family preparing for and then attending a purity ball, a controversial formal dance event, popular among some conservative Christians, that gained notoriety in the early 2000s. At a typical event, fathers and their teenage daughters dress in formal ball attire for a night that involves dinner and dancing and culminates with the daughter signing a pledge to her father to abstain from dating and to remain sexually abstinent until marriage.
The news segment examines purity balls and the general purity movement among conservative Christians through the lens of the Johnson family. It features clips of Johnson and his daughter at the ball with numerous other father-daughter pairs, and shows Johnson’s daughter vowing to him to live a life of purity, as well as her signing a pledge.
Johnson, his wife Kelly, and his daughter participated in interviews for the segment, which was posted on the German news channel’s website.
The news segment also features interviews with Johnson’s daughter, who is now in her 20s, and shows her at the purity ball pledging to her father “to make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future husband, and my future children … to a lifetime of purity, including sexual purity,” in between shots of Johnson nodding along in agreement.
In one brief interview clip, Johnson’s wife Kelly Johnson, a Christian counselor, told the German news outlet, “We don’t talk to her about contraception. Sex before marriage is simply out of the question.”
Remember when it was a staple of Savvy punditry to argue that social reactionaries were just dupes for supporting the Republican Party, who didn’t really support their cause? Women trying to obtain abortions in Republican-controlled states have not commented.