As the bad news for Donald Trump keeps coming (one of the latest is the way he used to walk unannounced into the dressing room backstage of the Miss USA contest that he ran in order to see all the contestants naked), some people are suggesting that his running mate Mike Pence should be at the top of the ticket, especially since he has on occasion tried to distance himself from some of Trump’s more incendiary remarks.
But Trump smacked down Pence during the second debate last Sunday, saying that Pence was wrong in his statements about Syria policy. Since Pence had said earlier that weekend that he could not defend Trump’s remarks about women, I saw this very public rebuke of Pence as a signal from Trump to tell him to get in line, pronto. And sure enough, the following day Pence came groveling back to Trump with his tail between his legs, using Jesus to explain his reversal.
We should remember that Pence, while soft-spoken, has truly awful and reactionary positions on many issues, having extreme views on abortion, LGBT, Planned Parenthood, and he strove to make life harder for poor people. Here is a list. He is also a climate change denialist and an intelligent design advocate.
Thanks to reader Jason, I watched this clip of Pence when he was in Congress give a speech on the floor (this may be around 2002) raising the same old rotten argument that evolution is ‘only a theory’ though it is being taught as a fact and that intelligent design should be taught as an alternative theory.
We should recall that that time was the heyday for ID before the 2005 Dover case pretty much took the air out of the ID movement’s efforts to include it in the school science curriculum. It is now being peddled only by dead-enders and the true believers.
My book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom was about the entire history of the failed attempts to prevent the teaching of the theory. The book I am currently working (tentatively titled THE PARADOX OF SCIENCE: How we can be so confident about scientific theories without being certain) discusses, among other things, this precise issue of why the ‘only a theory and not a fact’ argument is a load of rubbish.
As a reminder, Pence: “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”
I thought HB2 was about not having people walking into the wrong bathrooms. Bit walking into dressing rooms is OK. Does this mean that it’s OK to walk into any room you are “boss” of? I am so confused by rules I’m just gonna have to be an anarchist.
Another case in point: two days ago Pence was contradicting Trump, saying that the Republican ticket would accept the results of the election, win or lose. Today he was hammering the Trump line that the election is “being stolen”.
He’s on a pretty short leash.
Correction: rather than “being stolen”, the claim is that the election is “rigged”. Maybe not much of a difference, but I wanted to be accurate about what they’re saying.