The Homophobia of Calling Mike Pence Gay

Vice President Mike Pence (R-IN)

One of the under-noted aspects of the Trump administration has been the vice presidency of Mike Pence.  Trump, a larger-than-life figure who has significant trouble conceding the spotlight to other individuals, was never going to be someone who let a vice president take center-stage that often.  While he might have a more powerful role behind-the-scenes (it's hard to tell who is actually in charge in a White House that is charitably described as chaotic), publicly he's pretty invisible compared to his immediate predecessors Dick Cheney and Joe Biden.  Recent comments that President Trump made about the vice president, however, opened up an examination of his LGBT rights record, and I want to put a stop to running joke on Twitter and Facebook, that of Mike Pence being gay.

According to a recent New Yorker article, during a discussion of LGBT rights, Trump stated about the vice president "don't ask that guy-he wants to hang them all!"  While Pence has not publicly called for gay people to be put to death, his record on LGBT rights is, well, abysmal, even by Republican standards.  Pence has called being gay a choice and said that gay marriage would lead to "societal collapse."  He opposed measures to end workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, and also opposed the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  He backed a "religious freedom" bill that would make it easier for businesses to discriminate against gay people, and while he was in the House, he supported measures that would have meant federal funding for so-called "conversion therapy," which has been widely discredited by the AMA and APA, and is seen by many as a torture device against gay people.  He also allowed an HIV pandemic in Scott County by stopping needle exchanges, and has been largely apathetic to people who suffer from HIV and AIDS.

This is not someone who is a friend to the gay community, and indeed puts Pence more in-line with Roy Moore on the issue than some more progressive Republicans like Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski.  Trump's joke was likely just that, a joke, another ill-timed rejoinder from a man who doesn't realize that what he says actually matters now and isn't just fodder for Daily News headlines, but it does come from a place-of-truth.  Pence has a heinous record on gay rights, crossing the line in my opinion from political position to downright homophobic, and should not be associated with our community in any way, shape or form.

And yet, "Mike Pence is gay" is a popular meme or running joke, particularly amongst liberals and progressives on social media.  It's something I hear from Democratic friends of mine all the time (for what it's worth, largely straight friends), who are well-meaningly assuming that Pence can't possibly be this homophobic without it coming from a place of self-hatred.  There is precedence for this.  People like Rev. Ted Haggard or Rep. Ed Schrock were deeply anti-gay in their public lives and comments, all-the-while carrying on gay affairs in their private lives.  The titillation of such stories, combined with the hypocrisy, have made them popular clickbait, and may explain why people have made Pence a frequent target of "he must be gay" dismissals.

The evidence, though, shows that Pence isn't gay.  He's famously devoted to his wife Karen, albeit in a way that seems to resemble a 1950's-style relationship more than anything else, refusing to even meet with women one-on-one in professional settings.  Other than snarky comments online, there's no evidence of Pence having had any same-sex relationships with men in the past.  No credible (or even by my internet searches, non-credible) persons have come forward claiming to have engaged in gay sexual or romantic activity with the vice president.  The entire meme is predicated, therefore, on two things: that calling Pence gay is an insult, or that anti-gay people have to be gay in order to hold their beliefs.

These are both deeply homophobic roots of a joke, even if they are being perpetuated by people who see themselves as allies of the LGBT movement.  For starters, calling someone gay is not an insult, except when you mean it to be and then you're homophobic.  If you're referring to the Vice President as gay to try and goad him or mock him, that's in the same vein as calling the school bully gay as well; it may be well-meaning, but it continues the tacit implication that being gay is wrong.  What you should call him is a bigot, which is accurate, and doesn't continue to demonize gay people, cause quite frankly we don't want someone as hateful as Mike Pence on our team.

The second part is more problematic, though, because it insinuates that gay rights are at a place that, well, they simply aren't yet.  It's easy to look at the success of DADT's repeal, gay marriage becoming nationwide law, and the increased public acceptance of LGBT public figures as a sign that everything is now "good" for the gay community, but this simply isn't the case.  LGBT people continue to experience high levels of discrimination, ranging from workplace harassment to higher levels of teenage suicide.  We also have an administration & Congress that is famously anti-LGBT, with President Trump trying to stop transgender soldiers from serving, a Vice President with one of the worst anti-gay records in the country, and right at the moment a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama who claimed, amongst other things, that homosexuality causes hurricanes (and even the "pro-gay" Republicans seem fine with him).  By pretending that gay people only endure discrimination from gay people, you're dismissing that discrimination out-of-hand, and you're also blaming gay people for the discrimination against gay people, when in reality it's largely perpetrated by straight people like Mike Pence, who use their "strong religious beliefs" as a cloak to attack LGBT citizens.  Pence is not a friend to the gay community, nor is he a member of it, and the quicker we stamp out that meme and its associations, the faster we can refocus on defeating Pence and politicians like him at the ballot box.