Gage Skidmore
Since his Inauguration, Trump’s merry-go-round administration has been a consistent source of horror and amusement, most recently illustrated in Michaels Wolff’s expose, Fire and Fury. In the midst of the chaotic palace intrigue, one man seems to remain above the fray: Vice President Michael Richard Pence.
But it’s a bad idea to lose track of Mike Pence, particularly if you care about gay, lesbian, trans, and queer rights. In many ways, the Vice President has made attacking LGBTQ+ rights the cornerstone of his political career. And a look at his past crusades against this community leaves little room for doubt that he will continue that mission.
To be sure, Pence gives lefty voters across the spectrum a lot to worry about. As Vice President, he has made six tie breaking votes in Senate, more than Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden combined. He cast the final vote scrapping federal rules to protect consumers from predatory financial organizations, what Senator Elizabeth Warren called a “giant wet kiss to Wall Street.”
It was Pence’s vote that confirmed Trump nominee Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education and kickstarted a debate on Obamacare repeal. Most controversial, perhaps, was Pence’s approval of a bill to allow states to withhold federal funds for Planned Parenthood and other organizations providing reproductive healthcare, a longtime goal of Pence and his rightwing evangelical Christian allies.
In the midst of the chaotic palace intrigue, one man seems to remain above the fray: Vice President Michael Richard Pence. But it’s a bad idea to lose track of him.
Predictably, Pence used religious justification to push his agenda. “The day Obamacare passed was also a day of disappointment for the sanctity of life, but hope is finally shining through,” Pence said. “When this bill passes, it will be one of the defining victories for life.” According to a March 2017 poll, 75 percent of Americans, Republicans as well as Democrats, support the federal government’s continued funding of Planned Parenthood.
From early in his career, Pence has expressed outlier views. In 1992, with two failed Congressional bids behind him, he began hosting a local conservative talk-show that diligently catered to Indiana housewives and retirees. He also launched a blog, hosted a local TV show, and published a newsletter called the “Pence Report.”
In an op-ed in 2000, Pence denied the correlation between smoking cigarettes and mortality. “Time for a quick reality check,” he wrote. “Despite the hysteria from the political class and media, smoking doesn’t kill.”
In similar fashion, Pence has denied global warming, citing “growing skepticism among scientists” about climate change and saying CO2 from fossil fuels can’t increase temperatures because it “is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature.” He has also dismissed climate change as “an issue for the left." After Hurricane Katrina, Pence and other lawmakers pushed President George W. Bush to adopt a list of “pro-free market ideas”—all more concerned with profit than with relief.
But it is toward the gay community that Pence has expressed his most extreme views, so much so that Donald Trump once joked that Pence “wants to hang them all.”
In 2006, as head of the Republican Study Committee, a group of the most-conservative House members, he defended marriage as between a man and a woman and argued that any change to that threatens the stability of society. “In the wake of ominous decisions by activist courts across the land, I come to the well today to defend that institution that forms the backbone of our society: traditional marriage,” he said. Marriage should be protected, he went on, because “it wasn’t our idea; it was God’s idea.”
“Marriage matters according to the researchers,” Pence stated, because “throughout history societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.”
In 2010, he opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which barred military service people from openly identifying as gay, claiming the military was no place for “social experimentation.” The website for his 2000 congressional campaign asserted that funding for HIV prevention “should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” (Conversion therapy has been called “brutal, inhuman psychological and at times physical abuse” by Rea Carey, executive director of the National LGBTQ+ Task Force.) In 2015, as governor of Indiana, Pence enabled an HIV outbreak in the state by cutting public health funds and denouncing, and then delaying, a needle exchange when residents going untested were sharing needles, spreading the disease.
It is toward the gay community that Pence has expressed his most extreme views, so much so that Donald Trump once joked that Pence “wants to hang them all.”
Pence gained infamy that same year for a pushing a bill to jail same-sex couples who applied for marriage licenses. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a bill “to empower individuals when they believe actions of government impinge on their constitutional freedom of religion”—effectively allowing businesses to deny customers service on the basis of religious grounds.
Pence claimed that the bill was not homophobic, but about preventing government overreach on religious liberties. Eric Miller, one of Indiana’s leading anti-gay activists who likened homosexuality to peadophilia, stood next to Mike Pence as he signed the bill.
The passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was met with outrage by companies, celebrities, and thousands of Indiana residents. Angie’s List cancelled its $40 million expansion in Indianapolis, a move that would have brought a thousand new jobs to Indiana. New York, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont all banned state-funded travel to Indiana. At one point, the hashtag #boycottindiana was trending on Twitter. Even the Republican mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballard, called on the legislature to repeal the bill, saying it “sends the wrong signal.”
Following the backlash, Pence signed a revised amendment to the bill, barring businesses from discriminating based on gender identity or sexual orientation. However, statewide laws concerning discrimination outside the workplace remained unchanged.
Pence’s dogged championing of “religious freedom” at the expense of civil rights for LGTBQ+ people poses equally dangerous threats for groups already very vulnerable to prejudice and violence.
In twenty-eight states, LGBTQ+ people don’t have anti-discrimination laws that protect them in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations. And, following Indiana’s lead, states like Mississippi are deploying religious freedom to explicitly legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Mississippi’s Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, which went into effect in October, allows discrimination motivated by one of three beliefs: that marriage is a union between one man and one woman; that sexual relations can take place only within such a marriage; and that gender is an immutable biological characteristic.
As Vice President, he's been behind the implementation of a transgender ban in the military and championed a similar ban in public schools.
And Pence remains dedicated to rolling back civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people. He was behind the implementation of a transgender ban in the military, an effort subsequently blocked by federal judges. He also championed the transgender bathroom ban in public schools, a policy Trump later adopted.
A survey by the Human Rights Campaign released in January 2017 showed that 36 percent of transgender youth reported being personally bullied or harassed, and 56 percent had changed their self-expression or future plans since the election.
Just recently, on December 28, Kerrice Lewis, a lesbian woman of colour, was shot and burnt alive in the trunk of a car in Washington, D.C. Media reporting of the crime was so minimal that mourners and activists started using the hashtag #SayHerName to call attention to the lack of coverage.
LGTBQ+ people remain uniquely vulnerable to discrimination and extreme violence. In pushing “religious freedom” at the explicit expense of this community’s safety and well-being, Mike Pence reveals the depth of his dangerous bias. A country that allows discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity is not a country with equal rights.
Spencer Johnston is a freelance writer and poet based in London, England.