Unearthed video of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) at a “purity ball” with his daughter, Hannah, who was 13 at the time, is making the rounds on social media and drawing plenty of reaction this morning.
According to ABC News, the footage comes from a 2015 German news segment.
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.
Purity balls are common among right-wing evangelicals in the United States, even though research shows such events actually lead to increased pregnancy among teens.
The fact that the current leader of the House took his daughter to an event where she pledged to him that she’d remain chaste led to lots of commentary on Twitter.
