Donald Trump: Mike Pence wants to ‘hang all the gays’
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Donald Trump once said that Vice President Mike Pence wanted to hang all gay people.
Trump’s second-in-command – and next-in-line for the presidency, should any impeachment be successful – is the most homophobic politician to hold such a high office in recent history.
Pence, a hardline evangelical who has not supported a single LGBT reform across nearly two decades in politics, has one of the worst records on equality of any President or Vice President in living memory.
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Earlier this year, he pledged Trump’s “unwavering” support to Focus on the Family, an anti-LGBT religious group which the Southern Poverty Law Centre has named a hate group.
And he has previously suggested that HIV prevention funding be drained in order to fund state-sponsored ‘gay cure’ therapy.
But Trump went further during a meeting between him, the Vice President and a legal scholar.
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The conversation turned to LGBT rights, The New Yorker has reported – at which point Trump motioned to Pence and cracked a dark, dark joke.
“Don’t ask that guy,” said the actual leader of the free world. “He wants to hang them all!”
The President also made fun of his number two’s anti-abortion quest to overturn Roe v Wade.
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The scholar said that if Pence succeeded, many states would probably legalise abortion on their own.
“You see?” the President told Pence.
“You’ve wasted all this time and energy on it, and it’s not going to end abortion anyway.”
Pence sparked international outrage last year when he signed Indiana’s controversial ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’, giving businesses the right to discriminate against gay people on the grounds of religion.
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Last year, he appeared unable to answer when asked whether it should be legal to fire people because of their sexuality.
And since he’s been in office, officials from the Department of Justice have gone to court to argue that discrimination against gay employees is legal.
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Just last week, his administration issued a directive giving the go-ahead for religious businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.
This weekend, Saturday Night Live made fun of Pence’s homophobic views, as Beck Bennett’s version of the Vice President fled a same-sex wedding in sheer panic.
Last week, Trump told attendees at homophobic hate group the Family Research Council that they would no longer be silenced.
While becoming the first president to address the conference of a recognised anti-LGBT hate group, he repeatedly made outrageous statements.
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“We will not allow government workers to censor sermons or target our pastors, our ministers, our rabbis,” he said.
“These are the people we want to hear from and they’re not going to be silenced any longer.”
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The President added that he salutes every person serving in the armed force, despite introducing a ban on transgender soldiers serving.
Speaking alongside Trump at the summit was former Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, who made shocking comments that he wants to “rid the Earth” of “wicked” gays.
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And wasn’t the only anti-gay extremist to speak alongside the 45th president.
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has said he doesn’t know whether or not gays and lesbians should be put to death, will also be addressing the event.
Moore, now backed by Trump, was recently removed as a state supreme court justice for instructing state employees to ignore the US Supreme Court ruling in favour of marriage equality.
