After being rightfully criticized for taking a teaching job at a school that discriminates against LGBTQ children and teachers, Second Lady Karen Pence took a page from Steve King’s defensive playbook, essentially saying, since when is believing in a right-wing Christian theology that gay people are immoral and shall burn in hell for all eternity offensive?
“It’s absurd that her decision to teach art to children at a Christian school, and the school’s religious beliefs, are under attack,” a spokesperson for Pence said in a statement to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Listen, no one is upset that Pence is teaching art to children. It’s not even that Christianity as a whole is under attack (it’s not). It’s that the Immanuel Christian School in Virginia explicitly bars students from enrolling who participate in or condone “homosexual activity” or challenge gender roles in any way, and whatever art students are allowed to make there probably features scenes of Sodom and Gomorrah burning to the ground and women turning into salt pillars, or something.
This is Pence’s second time teaching at the school, the first time being between 2001-2013. Which is why to Vice President Mike Pence, who implemented discriminatory laws targeting the LGBTQ community as governor of Indiana, all this fuss over Mother’s teaching job is just something else to brush off. Lauren Ashburn, a host for the Catholic TV network ETWN’s news show, teased her interview with the vice president airing tonight, which included him saying he and his wife “let the critics roll off our backs.”
God, he looks so pained just sitting close to a woman who isn’t Mother dearest.
For more about Mother Pence’s favorite casserole and almost certainly no serious discussion about why a school should be allowed to make its teachers pledge not to watch porn, that full interview airs tonight 7 p.m. ET.