Make no mistake, Gov. Mike Pence is not a good guy.
Sure, Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate showed us all that he can do what most people can do — debate levelheadedly. Pence was calm, composed and relatively uncontroversial. Therefore, a victory and very well-deserved one for the Republican camp. After all, they must be tired after last week.
But please, I urge you, don’t let Pence’s levelheaded performance detract you from his absurd record on, well, everything. Nominee Donald Trump talks and talks and talks forever about doing a lot of very outlandish, offensive, horrible things but he’s never done any of them. The Donald has never held office. We have to approximate, deduce, infer the consequences of a Trump presidency from his (poor) business record. Pence is different; Pence talks about and subsequently does very outlandish, offensive and horrible things. It is from Pence that we can paint a more accurate picture of what America would look like under a Trump-Pence administration.
For starters, Pence is staunchly anti-gay rights. As governor of Indiana, he supported the use of HIV/AIDS revenue to fund conversion therapy and signed a seriously bogus religious freedom act into law. In terms of federal politics, he came out against repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for fear of “mainstreaming” homosexuality into the military, whatever the heck that means, and wanted to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage. I don’t doubt that, alongside Trump, Pence will work tirelessly to repeal that ruling — a historic ruling that’s progressed this country forward. With Mike Pence, we regress.
Second, he’s anti-women. He’s probably just as anti-women as Mr. Trump himself, only better at hiding it. Pence has crusaded long and hard against abortion, which, may I remind you, is the current law of the land and has been so since the 1970s. He kicked the crusade into full force when he upped the abortion restrictions in Indiana, making it one of only two states that prohibits abortion in cases of fetal abnormality. Trust me, it gets worse. Pence hates Planned Parenthood, a women’s healthcare center that offers free cancer screenings and STD testing. In fact, he hates it so much that he threatened to shut it down as Governor of Indiana. With Mike Pence, we regress.
Lastly, and this is an obvious one, he is running with Donald Trump, a definition deplorable. I am a firm believer that history is not cyclical and it doesn’t repeat. We exist on a linear belt of constant progress and we can never, ever look back. But that doesn’t mean that history cannot mirror what’s been supposedly laid to rest in its past. If we see an injustice or terror or malevolence rising, it is not only pragmatic but moral to reject it. We know this because we’ve experienced injustice, terror and malevolence in their most absolute forms. And when they were small and insignificant, we bought into them when we could have done otherwise. You can probably tell that I’m not a fatalist, either. We have the power to change history in the same way that it has the power to change us.
Mike Pence is a bystander in the purest form. He not only refuses to reject malevolence, he takes it by the hand. He runs with it. He puts its name on the same banner. He defends it every chance that he gets. And it is often the bystander, not the bully, that does the most damage.
We can do better than Mike Pence. We can do better than Donald Trump. We have the obligation to reject them or else history will rhyme.
