Mike Pence vice presidential campaign, 2016/LGBTQ rights

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Mike Pence
Republican vice presidential nominee
Running mate: Donald Trump

Election
Republican National Convention • Polls • Presidential debates • Vice presidential debate • Presidential election by state

On the issues
Domestic affairs • Economic affairs and government regulations • Foreign affairs and national security

Other candidates
Hillary Clinton (D) • Jill Stein (G) • Gary Johnson (L) • Vice presidential candidates

See what Mike Pence and the 2016 Republican Party Platform said about LGBTQ rights.

Pence on LGBTQ rights

In response to the directive issued by the Obama administration on May 13, 2016, stating that transgender public school students must be afforded the right to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identities, Pence said, “The federal government has no business getting involved in issues of this nature.”^[1]

Pence supported Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy that prohibited soldiers from openly identifying as gay until it was ended in 2011. Pence told CNN in 2010 that without the policy, the military could become “a backdrop for social experimentation.”^[1]

In 2007, Pence voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a law to prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. He said the law “wages war on freedom and religion in the workplace.”^[1]

In 2006, Mike Pence voted for H.J.Res.88 - the Marriage Protection Amendment, which proposed declaring "that: (1) marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman; and (2) neither the U.S. Constitution nor the constitution of any state shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon any other union."^[2]

In 2006, Pence supported a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Pence said in a speech that cited a Harvard researcher, “societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.” Pence also said that being gay is a choice and that preventing gay couples from marrying was not discrimination, but a means of enforcing "God's idea."^[1]

Read what the 2016 presidential candidates and other vice presidential candidates said about LGBTQ rights.

The 2016 Republican Party Platform on LGBTQ rights

“	Defending Marriage Against an Activist Judiciary Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.^[3]	”
—2016 Republican Party Platform^[4]

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