Apparently for all the Trump supporter talk about liberals needing a “safe space,” the Pences need a safe space to protect them from oh-so-scary LGBT people. Second Lady Karen Pence will be teaching art part time at a private Christian school outside D.C. where LGBT people are explicitly not allowed to be on staff or even among the students. The school even says they’ll kick a child out if their parents are LGBT.
The school where Karen Pence will be working makes potential employees sign a pledge promising they won’t participate in “homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity.”
They also have to explain their “view of the creation/evolution debate.” pic.twitter.com/7gnJEw26gb
— Rebecca Klein (@rklein90) January 15, 2019
Although no one would say whether she’d actually formally agreed to the requirements, the Immanuel Christian School makes potential employees sign off on the standards on their application for employment.
The application makes no distinction between extramarital sex, homosexual relationships, and sexual abuse of minors. They’re all in the same list of behaviors liable to get someone fired from the school, which is offered without pause.
This fiasco is hardly the first time that the Pences personally have come under scrutiny for staunch opposition to the very existence of LGBT people. No doubt most infamously, back when he was governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law supposedly protecting religious freedom that for a time, made explicit discrimination against LGBT people legal. Although he’s made his personal views obvious, Pence was eventually forced to offer a qualification for the law that protected LGBT people from the “religious freedom” the measure was meant to enshrine.
Before his time as governor, Pence served in Congress where he distinguished himself through means like trumpeting support for a Constitutional amendment that would have formally defined marriage as between one man and one woman exclusively. Karen Pence taught at the same school in question now for a lengthy period concurrent to her husband’s time in D.C.
At the time, pointedly denouncing the very existence of people outside his preferred norm, the eventual Vice President Pence asserted that “societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.” In the time since, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that gay marriage is legal across the entire United States.
That’s hardly stopped the Pences though, as Karen’s proud association with the virulently anti-LGBT school indicates. Just late this last year, her husband spoke at the Family Research Council’s annual conference, although the virulently anti-LGBT organization has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. President Donald Trump had himself previously spoken at the event, and he and Pence were the first president and vice president to ever appear there.
George Washington Law School’s Professor Robert Tuttle noted how Karen’s decision to take up her new anti-LGBT position figures into the broader portrait of the Trump team’s relationship with staunch conservatives, explaining:
‘They have staked out a certain set of positions on issues that are confrontational. The administration seems to live on wedges, so paying attention to this just feeds their interest in driving one more wedge. And this confirms their bona fides with religious conservatives and they sort of seem to do that, because Donald Trump, whatever he might say, is not that.’
LGBT people are among a number of minority groups targeted by the Trump administration ranging from immigrants to Muslims at this point.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
