Vice-President Mike Pence, when he was the governor of Indiana, invited prominent anti-gay campaigners to a private ceremony, during which he signed a “religious-freedom law” that effectively legalized anti-gay discrimination.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg recent statement is getting a lot of play, at least on the media I pay attention to. He is now polling number three after Biden and Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire. He said:
“My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man. And, yes, Mr. Vice-President, it has moved me closer to God. If me being gay was a choice it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand—that if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my Creator.”
There’s a thought-provoking article on Slate:
Pete Buttigieg Is Not “Feuding” With Mike Pence: He’s reminding everyone of the vice president’s cruelty.
We all know that Pence is a dyed in wool obsessive homophobe as opposed to a run of the mill homophobe who just is antigay but doesn't think a lot about it, but he’s someone for whom hating members, indeed having an aversion to members of the LGBTQ community and finding homosexuality repugnant is central to his own identity. He calls homosexuality pathological. In fact, his preoccupation with it is what’s pathological.
Not that readers need this, but here’s a reminder of who Pence is from the Slate article:
The vice president strongly opposes equal rights for LGBTQ people, a belief that serves as the throughline of his career. In the 1990s, Pence served as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank that published a journal notorious for anti-gay screeds. (One article described “gaydom” as a “pathological condition”; another asserted that “sexual infidelity and promiscuity are at the core of homosexual behavior.”)
Amy Sandler, who Pence made it almost impossible for her to see her wife when she was dying of cancer, wrote in Time (Mike Pence’s Hateful Laws Almost Kept Me From My Dying Wife)
Let my family’s painful experience be a window into the soul of Mike Pence. It should give us all great concern—not just about the discriminatory policies he is likely to promote, but about the cruelty and lack of humanity that is at his core.
In talking to friends about the possibility that Trump might not serve out his full term many have said with horror “and then we get Pence.” Now that it looks like Trump will manage to make it until 2020 and be the GOP candidate with his pasty-faced sycophant standing behind him gazing adoringly at the back of his head as if it had a halo hovering above it, we really don't have to worry about that because the Democrats will win. He will be relegated to the history books at the worst president ever who brought America to the precipice of total autocracy.
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The poll below is forced choice. Fortunately we don’t have to choose yet. A forced choice scale (also known as an ipsative scale) is a rating scale that does not allow for an Undecided, Neutral, Don't know or No opinion response. Polls like this are designed to force respondents to express an opinion or attitude. The scale forces the respondent to choose between two or more desirable options and pick the one that is most preferred and clearly indicates a definitive opinion. Reference