The optics were good. About 100 Carrier factory workers in Indianapolis sat in folding chairs awaiting President-elect Donald Trump, who had announced, via Twitter, he'd saved their jobs. Well, not all their jobs – 730 were saved while another 550 were heading to Mexico – but that was a small detail. (Trump also kept saying he had saved air-conditioning jobs, though the factory makes furnaces.) After a while, a silver-haired man resembling the guy on top of a wedding cake strode to the podium.
For the past week, women have been calling and emailing the office of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to tell him about their periods. In detail.
Several women have called the office of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence sharing information that the Republican might consider "TMI" -- detailed descriptions of their menstrual cycles.
State lawmakers plan to clarify Indiana’s controversial new religious-freedom law by explicitly preventing businesses from using the legislation to defend discrimination against LGBT citizens, according to draft language first obtained by the Indianapolis Star. The new bill, currently circulating through the Indiana state legislature, specifies that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act cannot be used in court as a defense for individuals who refuse to do business with people based on their sexual orientation.
Despite the backup he was getting from every Republican presidential candidate who has discussed the issue and pretty much every conservative commentator who has mentioned it, Indiana governor Mike Pence gave gay people and liberals a victory today when he announced that he’s expecting his legislature to send him a bill “clarifying” the legislation he recently signed on religious freedom. Pence wouldn’t characterize it that way, of course. He’d say (and did say, about a hundred times) that nothing in the law gave anyone a license to discriminate, and the new legislation would merely make that explicit. But no matter how many times he said it, that was indeed what the law would likely have done.
There’s been an amazing backlash against the new law in Indiana, signed by Gov. Mike Pence, that appears to give business owners broad rights to discriminate against LGBT people by citing “religious freedom.” The backlash is so rampant that Pence has already started dodging and weaving and pretending that this bill has nothing to do with gay people, even though, when he signed it, he made sure to surround himself with anti-gay activists so you know that’s exactly what this is all about. The backlash is kind of surprising, when you consider that it's already legal to discriminate against LGBT people in Indiana without having to pull the Jesus card to do it. Pence’s maddening dishonesty might be fueling the rage: Lying plus bigotry is a toxic combination.
No one, I think, would ever have denied that Maurice Bessinger was a man of faith. And he wasn’t particularly a “still, small voice” man either; he wanted everybody in earshot to know that slavery had been God’s will, that desegregation was Satan’s work, and the federal government was the Antichrist. God wanted only whites to eat at Bessinger’s six Piggie Park barbecue joints; so His servant Maurice took that fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 decided that his religious freedom argument was “patently frivolous.”
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) refused to say on Sunday whether it should be illegal under state law to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Pence appeared on ABC's "This Week" to defend his decision to sign a controversial piece of legislation intended to protect religious liberties that critics say will enable discrimination in the state. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow individuals and corporations to cite religious beliefs in private litigation. Pence's decision to sign the bill into law has sparked backlash against the state.