Vice President Mike Pence arrives at a campaign rally at the BOK Center, June 20, 2020 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Vice president Mike Pence has reacted pretty much exactly as you’d expect to the Supreme Court ruling that you can’t just fire people for being gay anymore.
Pence, known for his hardline anti-LGBT+ beliefs, has been core to efforts to roll back equality under the Trump administration.
But his work hit a stumbling block last Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that existing civil rights laws which outlaw discrimination based on sex can be used to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Pence addressed the ruling at a rally in Tulsa on Saturday night – vowing to stack the courts with even more conservatives if Trump is re-elected for a second term.
Mike Pence says Supreme Court needs ‘more conservatives’.
He told the rally: “Joe Biden is making plans to appoint activist judges who will legislate from the bench, but next week, president Trump will appoint his 200th judge to our federal courts, all conservative jurists who are upholding the God-given liberties enshrined in our constitution, like the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and the second amendment right to keep and bear arms.
“With four more years, this president will appoint even more judges. And like we learned this past week, we need more conservative justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Trump administration argued that it’s legal to fire people for being LGBT+.
Last week, president Trump appeared unaware that his own administration had intervened in the case to argue that the Civil Rights Act does not apply to LGBT+ people.
Asked about the case, Trump said that the Trump administration would “live with the decision of the Supreme Court”.
However in a subsequent Twitter storm he raged about a stream of losses at the Supreme Court – which also slapped down a Trump administration challenge to the DACA immigration program.
Trump wrote: “The recent Supreme Court decisions, not only on DACA, sanctuary cities, census, and others, tell you only one thing, we need NEW JUSTICES of the Supreme Court.
“If the radical left Democrats assume power, your second amendment, right to life, secure borders, and religious liberty, among many other things, are OVER and GONE!”