In a The New Yorker article,
President Donald Trump is quoted as joking that Vice President Mike
Pence “wants to hang” all gay people.
In The
Danger of President Pence, Jane Mayer traces Pence's career
in politics, starting as a U.S. House member, and his ties to the
social conservative movement and the corporate right.
Mayer recounts a meeting Trump and
Pence had with a legal scholar where Trump mocked Pence's socially
conservative views.
When the legal scholar pointed out that
even without Roe v. Wade many states would legalize abortion
on their own, Trump said to Pence, “You see? You've wasted all
this time and energy on it, and it's not going to end abortion
anyway.”
When the subject of gay rights turned
up, Trump, motioning to Pence, joke, “Don't ask that guy – he
wants to hang them all!”
Pence has a long record of opposing
LGBT rights in the U.S. House and as governor of Indiana.
He made national headlines in 2015 when
he signed a bill into law that opponents said would allow business
owners to refuse to serve members of the LGBT community based on
their religious beliefs. Then-Governor Pence at first defended his
decision to sign the bill, but a growing backlash pushed him to call
for a “fix” to the law.