Aspen Times Pence Ake America Gay Again

Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Aspen, Colorado, this calendar week for a holiday holiday - but not without encountering a silent protest from his neighbors in the liberal ski resort town.

"Make America Gay Again," reads a rainbow imprint posted on the stone pillars at the end of the driveway of the home where Pence and his wife, Karen, are staying.

A dispatcher with the Pitkin County Sheriff'due south Office referred The Washington Postal service to the White Business firm printing role Saturday, but sheriff'southward deputy Michael Buglione told the Aspen Times that Pence's adjacent-door neighbors posted the banners shortly afterward the vice president and his family arrived on Tuesday. In an electronic mail to the Aspen Times, Shannon Slade said she is a girlfriend of ane of the daughters of the couple living in the business firm and that they posted the banner.

LGBT advocates accept previously showed their opposition to Pence.

In December, residents in the affluent Washington neighborhood of Chevy Chase hoisted rainbow flags outside their homes following news that Pence, then newly elected, would live there temporarily before moving to the vice president's residence at the Naval Observatory.

Protesters showed up the following calendar month, dancing their fashion through the neighborhood and to the house Pence had rented ahead of the inauguration.

Pence, who has often described himself every bit "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order," has a long history of opposing same-sex marriage and other policies that provide equal protections to members of the LGBT community.

As Indiana governor, a position he held before he was tapped as President Donald Trump'southward running mate, Pence signed into constabulary a controversial legislation that advocates said would let businesses to discriminate against members of the LGBT customs. The national uproar over the divisive bill, called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, prompted Indiana legislators to modify it by adding anti-discrimination protections. Only those merely applied in cities, some of which are the most liberal in the land, where such protections already exist locally.

A paragraph on Pence'southward campaign website when he ran for Congress in 2000 fueled speculations that he is an advocate of conversion therapy, a practice of trying to change someone'due south sexual orientation that is banned in several states and discredited by medical organizations.

Pence said on his website that federal dollars should not go to organizations "that celebrate and encourage types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus" and funds should, instead, be given to "institutions which provide help to those seeking to change their sexual behavior."

Pence'due south spokesman, Marker Lotter, told The New York Times terminal year that the vice president does not support conversion therapy, and that his campaign statement was misinterpreted.

In Congress, where he was a member from 2001 to 2013 before becoming Indiana governor, Pence described traditional marriage as the establishment "that forms the backbone of our society." Citing a Harvard University sociologist during a speech on the House flooring, he said, "societal collapse was ever brought about following an advent of the deterioration of spousal relationship and family."

In 2007, Pence spoke against a beak that would protect gays and lesbians from discrimination in the workplace.

"If an employee keeps a Bible in his or her cubicle, if an employee displays a Bible verse on their desk, that employee could exist claimed by a homosexual colleague to be creating a hostile work environment," he said on the House floor.

Pence opposed 2009 legislation that would expand federal detest-criminal offense statutes to include protections based on gender, inability and sexual orientation. Pence said on the House floor that he feared the beak "could take a chilling result on the religious expression and religious freedom of millions of Americans."

The New Yorker reported in October that Trump mocked Pence's religious and socially conservative beliefs and joked that the vice president wants to "hang" gays. Pence's press secretary, Alyssa Farah, said in a statement to The Post that the lengthy piece with the headline, "The Danger of President Pence," is "unsubstantiated" and filled with "untrue and offensive" claims.

In Aspen, the banner didn't seem to cause tension.

Buglione, the sheriff'south deputy, told the Aspen Times that the Surreptitious Service agents were not bothered by the banner and were cordial with the residents who posted information technology.

Aspen is the county seat of Pitkin, where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by a meaning margin: 69.7 per centum to 24.three percent. Clinton won Colorado with a nearly 3 percentage lead. The state went to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

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Source: https://www.jacksonville.com/news/national/2017-12-30/mike-pence-s-colorado-neighbors-troll-him-make-america-gay-again-banner

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