Vice President Mike Pence continues to be a great secondary source of comic relief when it comes to the Donald Trump presidency. As various reports point out, Pence’s neighbors at his Aspen-area residence saw a great opportunity to troll the notoriously anti-LGBT VP and hung a banner outside his residence last week reading, “Make America Gay Again.”
According to The Aspen Times, the neighbors displayed the slogan on a rainbow flag and hung it on a stone pillar that sits at the end of the driveways to both homes. According to the report, the Secret Service did nothing to stop the banner’s display. Pence arrived in Aspen this Tuesday and was greeted by the banner.
“He was real sheepish and thought he might be confronted by the Secret Service or deputies who’d tell him he couldn’t do it,” Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo said. “When they said, ‘We’re not here to control your free speech rights,’ they came out with chili and began feeding them.
Vice President Mike Pence @VP, is currently vacationing in Aspen, Colorado.
This is a banner that the neighbors hung this weekend.
Retweet the heck out of this!! pic.twitter.com/nCfURQu2Al
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) December 30, 2017
From The Aspen Times:
DiSalvo said he fully supports anyone exercising their First Amendment rights and said Aspenites have a history of expressing their opinions to powerful people who visit the area. He specifically brought up the intrepid daredevil who climbed the large blue spruce tree next to the Castle Creek Bridge and hung a sign that read, “Inhale To The Chief” when then-President Bill Clinton visited Aspen in the mid-1990s.
Pence’s Christian fundamentalism is unwavering, especially when it comes to the LGBT community. When he was governor of Indiana, he tried to amend the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriages, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
As Politifact points out, Pence once seemed willing to take his belief in “family values” a step further and direct taxpayer dollars towards a practice so psychologically harmful that it was banned in five states. That practice, known as “gay conversion therapy,” claims to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight.
Featured image via James McNellis (Flickr)