Republicans have been accusing Democrats of secretly demanding concessions on LGBTQ+ issues to end the shutdown for the past month, despite LGBTQ+ issues not appearing at all in the continuing resolutions that would reopen the government. Now House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is getting called out by the myth-busting website Snopes for saying that Democrats are supposedly demanding funding for LGBTQ+ Balkans.

The shutdown happened because Congress was unable to pass legislation to fund the federal government. Both Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans put forward continuing resolutions to fund the government, but neither passed because not enough senators from the opposing party voted for either, so the 60-vote threshold wasn’t met.

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The main difference between the Republican and Democratic resolutions is whether certain health care subsidies would run out at the end of this year: the Democrats’ resolution kept the health care credits alive, while the Republican resolution let them expire. The Democratic continuing resolution also contains some provisions that would make it more difficult for the president to simply ignore Congress’ power of the purse, since, as Democrats pointed out, there’s no use in negotiating an end to the shutdown if the White House isn’t going to respect Congress’ agreement.

Democrats have been focusing the story on the health care credits, arguing that Republicans let the government shut down in order to make health care costs go up for millions of Americans and to partially fund tax breaks for the wealthy.

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Republicans are trying to shift the framing and blame LGBTQ+ people in particular. The president and other Republicans, for example, have said that the shutdown is happening because Democrats want free health care for undocumented immigrants and “transgender for everybody,” which isn’t true.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Johnson tried again to make the shutdown about LGBTQ+ people, saying that “Democrats are demanding… money to foreign countries,” including “$4 million for LGBTQI+ democracy grants in the Balkans. They want $2 million for feminist democratic principles projects in Africa. We’re not doing that.”