My Name Is Mike Pence, and I Am Very Confused About the Gays

Hey, it’s me, Mike Pence—you know, the Vice President, the one with the dead eyes? For some reason, the first openly gay male athlete to qualify for the U.S. Winter Olympics team implied that he doesn’t want to hang out with me in Pyeongchang, and I can’t figure out why. So I’m freaking out about it on Twitter.

Why would anyone deny me a photo-op? Is it my extreme right-wing evangelical zealotry that has dominated my every political maneuver since entering politics? Is it my dead eyes? Is it agreeing to serve as an enabling yes man to Donald Trump, the guy who once joked that I want to hang all LGBT people?

Can we even do that? We can’t do that, right?

Cindy, make a note to look into the laws there—the New Testament is pretty clear that we can’t straight-up kill gay people (unfortunately, Jesus never said anything about them, or we could totally try), but you never know. God knows I’ve used the law in a country founded upon the separation of church and state to limit people’s rights based on my personal interpretation of a holy book often enough before. It’s kind of my thing.

Haha, just kidding about that Cindy part. Everyone knows I’m not likely to employ women as close associates because then I might have to be alone in a room with them without my wife present, and that’s a big no-no. Who knows what I would do if I was alone with a woman I wasn’t wedded to? Jesus would know. So I don’t do it.

But seriously, Gary—look into those laws.

Now, just because the President said humorously that I’d hang all you gays if I could, it doesn’t mean I want someone in the spotlight drawing attention to the actual abhorrent things I’ve done to the community in the past. So when that figure-skating Adam Rippon told the press he didn’t want to party down with me at the Olympics in Korea—that’s the Southern Korea, you won’t catch me in the other Korea—well, I just couldn’t stand to hear that kind of backtalk.

I decided to take a page out of the ol’ Presidential booklet and Tweet statements that contradict what’s known and established about me and also yell in caps about FAKE NEWS. It helps with Donald’s bad press all the time. Nothing sticks to that guy. Nothing.

Even I don’t really know what’s going on with me now, though to be fair that’s a state I’m generally comfortable with. I, Mike Pence, a person with dead eyes and a pet bunny, a straight heterosexual male who has spent countless years trying to curtail gay rights, am Tweeting support at a gay athlete. Why? Because I don’t want crappy news coverage when I’m about to have my big Olympics moment and for once no one will be talking about Russia. Are you not following me here?

Instead, I’m claiming my long documented history of fighting against LGBT equality tooth and nail is FAKE NEWS. FAKE NEWS like the statement I wrote out in 2000, where I said: “Congress should support the reauthorization of the [HIV funding] Ryan White Care Act only after completion of an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organisations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviours that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus.” See? It’s all FAKE NEWS. I never actually said anything like “the gays are spreading the HIV.” Show me where I said it. I didn’t. BAM.

Yeah, I’m calling out #FAKENEWS with a hashtag and everything—the blanket cover we’ve invented to distract from anything that looks bad/illegal/treason-y. In this case, the real specific FAKE NEWS I’m referring to are those reports that I funded gay conversion therapy that basically amounts to torture when I was governor of a little state called Indiana. WRONG.

I simply suggested that federal funding could “be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.” There’s a difference. I didn’t actually get to torture anyone.

Anyway, these ingenious Tweets are sure to throw ’em all for a loop. One Tweet fired off at 1 am with less than 6k likes surely balances out my life’s work of seeking to legislate that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman, so that the man need never be alone with another woman that he isn’t married to. Because who knows what would happen then? Jesus would. We’ve been over this.

I’m glad we got this all cleared up. See you in SOUTH Korea!

(images: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

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Kaila Hale-Stern

Kaila Hale-Stern (she/her) is a content director, editor, and writer who has been working in digital media for more than fifteen years. She started at TMS in 2016. She loves to write about TV—especially science fiction, fantasy, and mystery shows—and movies, with an emphasis on Marvel. Talk to her about fandom, queer representation, and Captain Kirk. Kaila has written for io9, Gizmodo, New York Magazine, The Awl, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and once published a Harlequin novel you'll never find.

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