Quote:In 2015, as governor of Indiana, Mike Pence became the lightning rod in a national controversy surrounding a religious freedom bill that critics said would enable anti-LGBT discrimination in the state. The backlash was swift as corporations threatened to take their business out of the state. Pence ultimately capitulated, signing a modified version of the bill to quell the controversy. But it’s far from the only example of anti-LGBT activity on Pence’s resume. In 2000, Pence affirmed his support for conversion therapy, a practice that’s been banned on LGBT minors in five states and in DC. In 2006, when he was head of the Republican Study Committee, Pence referred to gay marriage as emblematic of “societal collapse” and called being gay a choice. As a congressman, he advocated for defunding Planned Parenthood and for defining marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Quote:But Cliston Brown, a columnist at the Observer (which is owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser), offered the most apocalyptic take on a Pence presidency. “While Pence clearly has more self-control and self-awareness than Trump, that’s exactly what makes him more dangerous. He has all the same ideas and goals as Trump—and, as an added bonus, a religious-right agenda that’s even worse—and a much better chance of actually implementing them,” Brown wrote. Trump’s presidency will continue to be a smoldering ruin, allowing Democrats to retake the House in 2018 and the White House in 2020 and putting the party “in a position to control the country for a decade.” By contrast, Brown argued, President Pence would win broad approval, cementing Republican control of government until 2024— at which point the Republicans could have a 7-2 Supreme Court majority that would cast a reactionary shadow for the next half-century.

Quote:During the 2016 primaries, one of Trump’s main attacks on his Republican opponents was that they were “puppets” of the Koch brothers, accepting donations from the billionaires. A billionaire himself, Trump made a point of saying he didn’t need to accept donations from anyone else. He ultimately did, accepting more than $79 million in Super PAC money, but the Kochs made a point not to donate to his presidential campaign.
Pence has been closely affiliated with the Koch brothers since he was a Congress member from Indiana. He helped boost the “No Climate Tax” pledge by their political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, convincing other politicians to sign on. Many of Pence’s former political staffers have gone on to work for Koch Industries and their affiliated advocacy groups, and some have come back to work in the White House; a former Pence staffer named Marc Short now serves as the head of legislative affairs in the White House, and has close ties to the Koch brothers. Pence also helped boost Cabinet members including DeVos and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, both Koch favorites. Democrats and Steve Bannon alike have openly complained about the Kochs’ influence on Pence. The vice president is, as the saying goes, only a heartbeat away from the presidency. Contemplating the possibility of Pence as president, Bannon told Mayer, “I’m concerned he’d be a president that the Kochs would own.”

Quote:So it’s time to look harder at Pence. “The Shadow President” does. It lays out his disregard for science, evident in his onetime insistence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and a belief that alarms about climate change were “a secret effort to increase government control over people’s lives for some unstated diabolical purpose,” according to the book. 

It suggests callousness at best toward African-Americans. As governor, Pence refused to pardon a black man who had spent almost a decade in prison for a crime that he clearly hadn’t committed. He also ignored a crisis — similar to the one in Flint, Mich. — in which people in a poor, largely black Indiana city were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. D’Antonio told me: “I think he’s just as driven by prejudice as Trump is.”

During the vice-presidential debate with Tim Kaine, Pence repeated the laughable, ludicrous assertion that Trump would release his tax returns “when the audit is over” and falsely insisted that Trump hadn’t lavished praise on Vladimir Putin’s leadership — though the record proved otherwise.

Fiercely opposed to abortion, Pence once spoke positively on the House floor about historical figures who “actually placed it beyond doubt that the offense of abortion was a capital offense, punishable even by death.” He seemed to back federal funds for anti-gay conversion therapy. He promoted a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage..

D’Antonio then recounted two stories that he heard from college classmates of Pence’s after the book had gone to bed, so they’re not in there. One involved a woman in Pence’s weekly college prayer group. When she couldn’t describe a discrete “born again” experience, “he lectured her on her deficiencies as a Christian and said that she really wasn’t the sort of Christian that needed to be in this group,” D’Antonio said. Another involved a college friend of Pence’s who later sought his counsel about coming out as gay. D’Antonio said that Pence told the friend: “You have to stay closeted, you have to get help, you’re sick and you’re not my friend anymore.”

Quote:In the wake of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue over the weekend that left 11 people dead, Vice President Mike Pence appeared with a rabbi at a campaign rally in Michigan — but the rabbi was a “Messianic rabbi” who’s part of the Jews for Jesus movement. Pence sparked outrage when he shared the stage with Loren Jacobs at a rally outside of Detroit. Messianic Judaism accepts Jesus as the messiah and embraces the New Testament. As the Washington Post notes, the major Jewish denominations and Israel view followers of Messianic Judaism as Christian.

Many onlookers slammed Jacobs’s appearance alongside Pence as insensitive and tone-deaf in the wake of the shooting on Saturday in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and wounded multiple others, including four police officers. Jacobs opened his prayer by invoking “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God and father of my lord and savior Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, and my God and father, too.” (As NBC News notes, many Messianic Jews refer to Jesus as “Yeshua.”)

He went on to lament divisions in the US, saying, “Our nation is so divided right now,” and invoked the “hate-inspired shooting” in Pittsburgh. “I pray that you would comfort all of those who are mourning because of those who were wounded and killed,” he said. “Lord, please work so that instead of division in our nation, there is unity and peace.”

Jacobs did not name the 11 victims of the Pittsburgh shooting in his prayer, but he did in his prayer for Republican politicians, including Pence, the presidential cabinet, and four Republican candidates for office. “I pray for them and for the Republican Party and its candidates so that they would honor you and your ways, that you might grant them victory in this election,” Jacobs said..

• Wants to convert Jews to Christianity
  
• Didn't mention the victims of the shooting in his prayer but prayed for Republicans to win the elections.
  

Quote:Describing the results of Donald Trump’s presidency as “remarkable” and “extraordinary“, the vice-president told senior European and Asian officials the European Union should follow the US in quitting the Iran nuclear deal and recognising the head of Venezuela’s congress, Juan Guaido, as president. “America is stronger than ever before and America is leading on the world stage once again,” Pence told officials at the Munich Security Conference, listing what he described as US foreign policy successes from Afghanistan to North Korea.

Quote:Conservative pundit and frequent Trump critic Bill Kristol on Thursday resurfaced a 2014 video of Vice President Pence saying it would be a “profound mistake” for former President Obama to override Congress with an executive order on immigration. “I think it would be a profound mistake for the President of the United States to overturn American immigration law with the stroke of a pen,” Pence, then governor of Indiana, said in the clip. The 2014 video was shared on the eve of President Trump’s anticipated declaration of a national emergency to bypass Congress and obtain funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Mike Pence: The president usurping power and end-running Congress is 'a profound mistake,’” Kristol wrote on Twitter.

Quote:Mike Pence has warned Christian graduates of an evangelical university that they should prepare to face ridicule for their beliefs. The deeply religious vice president told Liberty University students that “some of the loudest voices for tolerance today have little tolerance for traditional Christian beliefs”. In a commencement address at the college founded by right-wing preacher Jerry Falwell, he said: “Throughout most of American history, it’s been pretty easy to call yourself Christian. “It didn’t even occur to people that you might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible. But things are different now.

Quote:Vice President Pence on Thursday suggested that the Democratic Party supported late-term abortion and "infanticide" while speaking alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.  Pence said, among other things, that he was bothered by the Democrats "in our country, and leaders around the country, supporting late-term abortion, even infanticide." "But those are debates within the U.S., and I know that Canada will deal with those issues in a manner the people of Canada determine most appropriate," he continued. "For President Trump, for me, for our administration, we'll always stand for the right to life." The comments from Pence come as GOP-led state legislatures throughout the U.S. pass measures designed to restrict access to abortions. They also echoed a claim Trump made at a rally in Wisconsin last month, in which he alleged that the Democratic Party was "aggressively pushing extreme late-term abortion, allowing children to be ripped from their mother's womb." CNN noted that late-term abortions — procedures that typically take place 21 weeks into a pregnancy — account for less than 1.3 percent of abortions in America.

Quote:In most cases appointing the vice president to oversee an important task like this wouldn't raise eyebrows but then again this is Mike Pence, who has a long-running problem with science.  To give a few examples, the evangelical Christian once said that 'smoking doesn't kill', denied the theory of evolution and said that climate change is 'just an issue for the left'. Given the overwhelming evidence that Pence clearly has no interest or belief in science, him being placed in charge of tackling a virus which has already killed 3,000 people has not been greeted with a wave of enthusiasm.