House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has described his firefighter father's survival in a 1984 explosion as "an actual miracle" that was pivotal in his own religious faith, but his stepmother is now calling out his inaction on a related issue that had become his late father's passion in life.
Patrick Johnson joined a local community environmental group in Shreveport, Louisiana, working to fight a federal government plan for an open-air burn of 15 million pounds of toxic munitions, which would have sent massive amounts of known carcinogens into the open air, but his son did nothing to help as he entered the state legislature, reported The Guardian.
“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,’” said Janis Gabriel, who was married to Johnson's father. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”
Gabriel, who met Patrick Johnson in 2013 when he was a student at her Daoist center to practice tai chi and qigong martial arts, said a tense exchange followed as they pleaded with the newly elected state legislator for help.
“He just wasn’t interested,” Gabriel said. “He had other things to do. He was never interested in environmental things. It just blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort. He basically shut us down.”
The elder Johnson had survived an industrial explosion that killed a fellow firefighter when his son was 12, and the event became pivotal in both men's lives, but Gabriel says the congressman's religious faith peeled him away from the environmental concerns that his father was passionate about before his death from cancer in 2016.
“It speaks to those religious beliefs,” Gabriel said. “‘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.”
A spokeswoman for Johnson disputed Gabriel's characterization of the exchange but declined to elaborate, but a close friend of his father said he never accepted invitations to any of the citizen meetings they organized as local campaigning picked up against the burns at nearby Camp Minden.
“He stayed as far away from it as possible,” said Ron Hagar, a friend of the elder Johnson and chairman of the Citizens Advisory Group. “He had no sense of responsibility to stand up for the people he’s representing.”
The 72-year-old Gabriel moved out of state after her husband died but exchanged occasional messages and cards with his son, but she said the elder Johnson was “acutely aware of the environment” and “certainly didn’t agree” with Mike Johnson’s “extremist stance” on Christianity, but he accepted it.
She also noted that the disagreed over support for Donald Trump, who was first elected the same year Patrick Johnson died.
