“Make America Gay Again,” reads a rainbow banner wrapped around a stone pillar by the entrance to the Pence’s vacation pad.
The banner, first reported by The Aspen Times, was put up on Wednesday or Thursday by a neighbor who presumably takes issue with Pence’s deeply conservative stance on marriage equality and LBGTQ rights.
When reached by The New York Daily News, the local sheriff's office referred comment to a Pence spokeswoman, who did not respond to a request for comment.
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But Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo told The Aspen Times that one of his deputies were on site when a man who lives nearby came over and hung up the brightly-colored banner.
“He was real sheepish and thought he might be confronted by the Secret Service or deputies who’d tell him he couldn’t do it,” DiSalvo said. “When they said, ‘We're not here to control your free speech rights,’ (he) came out with chili and began feeding them.”
This isn’t the first time neighbors of the Pence family have trolled the vice president with rainbow colors.
In January, scores of people threw a LGBTQ-inspired dance party outside a Washington, D.C. house that the vice president was renting at the time.
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Pence, who has a long history of opposing policies providing equal protections for homosexual Americans, often describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”
While serving as a congressman, Pence described traditional marriage as the institution “that forms the backbone of our society” and once expressed fear that marriage equality legislation would lead to “societal collapse.”
While serving as the governor of Indiana, Pence signed into law a contentious bill that would permit businesses to openly discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community. The bill caused national outrage and Indiana lawmakers were eventually pressured into including some anti-discrimination provisions amid threats of companies boycotting the state.
Since entering the White House, Pence has been less outspoken but in October a shocking report claimed President Trump once joked to staffers that the vice president “wants to hang” all gay people.
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