Gay Trump official ‘not worried’ about homophobic VP Mike Pence
Gay billionaire Trump adviser Peter Thiel says he’s not fussed about a homophobe being one heartbeat away from the Presidency.
PayPal co-founder and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who is openly gay, is currently serving on the Trump transition team’s executive committee – sharing a table with anti-LGBT activists also on the board.
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Thiel said he was not fussed about anti-LGBT Republican Mike Pence being one heartbeat away from the Presidency.
He said: “You know, maybe I should be worried but I’m not that worried about it. I don’t know. People know too many gay people.
“There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted. For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people.”
He added that he doesn’t think anyone cares about Trump’s proposal to stack the Supreme Court with ultra-conservative justices. A shortlist released by Trump exclusively features judges who strongly oppose LGBT equality.
He said: “”I don’t think these things will particularly change. It’s like, even if you appointed a whole series of conservative Supreme Court justices, I’m not sure that [abortion case] Roe v. Wade would get overturned, ever.
“I don’t know if people even care about the Supreme Court. You know, you’d have thought the failure to have a vote on Merrick [Garland] would be a massive issue. And somehow it mattered to Democrats, but it didn’t matter to the public at large.”
He added: “I think Trump is very good on gay rights… I don’t think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”
Pence has previously confirmed plans to axe some Obama directives on trans equality.
VP-elect Mike Pence has an extremely poor record on LGBT rights.
A hardline evangelical, the Governor of Indiana stirred up international outrage in 2015 when he signed Indiana’s controversial ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’, which gave businesses the right to discriminate against gay people on the grounds of religion.
Governor Pence previously suggested that HIV prevention funding be drained in order to fund state-sponsored ‘gay cure’ therapy, and last year appeared unable to answer when asked whether it should be legal to fire people because of their sexuality.
An investigation in September found that Pence approved extreme anti-LGBT articles when he was the head of the Indiana Policy Review journal in the 1990s.
In an item published under his editorial tenure in the December 1993 issue, Pence’s journal criticised The Wall Street Journal for taking part in a job fair for gay journalists – suggesting that “gaydom” was a “pathological condition”, and arguing that gay journalists would be biased in their coverage because of their sexuality.
It claimed: “The more extreme of the gay movement consider themselves members of a sexual determined political party.”
Another edition published in 1993 attacked Bill Clinton for reforms to permit closeted gay people to serve in the army.
It claimed: “Homosexuals are not as a group able bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”
