Mike Pence is Still Here, Folks
Author(s): Dominic Sylvia Lauren and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Assorted In-Sights (In-Sight Publishing)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/16
In the wake of the recent surprise election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, we must remain mindful of the President-elect’s shadow: Mike Pence. He is the Vice President-elect of the United States. Furthermore, he believes a series of bizarre things, if not outright falsehoods, which we will explore in this piece. One positive comes out of this. He is upfront about them.
Pence is someone “who sees the last 40 years of progress on abortion, gay rights, civil rights, criminal justice reform and race relations as a disaster for the country,” the Huffington Post reports. His views, if implemented at a national level, can be legitimate threats to women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the environment.
Mike Pence has been fixated on defunding Planned Parenthood throughout all of his years in politics. He had already caused a lot of uproar on the matter even before he teamed up with sexist lunatic no.1, Donald Trump. He flirted with his anti-women’s reproductive rights ideal before 2007, when he was in Congress, as he pushed for the legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. It wasn’t until the government shutdown in 2011 that sparked like-minded Republicans to join Pence’s obsessive anti-abortion and anti-women’s rights campaigns.
Texas has been Pence’s pride and joy in this domain as the state has been a leader in such drastic and conservative affairs. In 2013, Texas brought Pence’s dream to life, as the state “successfully cut the network of clinics out of its public family planning program for low-income women” (Sarah Kliff, Vox). No access to contraceptives led to more babies being born in Texas, and no regard for women’s reproductive rights ultimately led to women’s personal life decisions being neglected and controlled.
Pence’s absurd obsession with defunding Planned Parenthood has not only negatively impacted the citizens of Texas; he even threw his own state, Indiana, under the bus. By leading outrageous and undemocratic campaigns against reproductive health, Scott County in Indiana became a hotbed for STDs, as Pence cut funding for the only HIV testing provider in Scott County in 2013. As a result, the County suffered a disastrous HIV outbreak.
Mike Pence’s proposed bill on anti-abortion is even too conservative for most conservatives. His proposed law, which was thankfully overturned by a Federal judge, supported banning abortion, even in the case of irreversible fetal anomalies. In addition, his law included forcing women who chose to undergo an abortion to also perform funeral services for their fetuses. This would require women to keep any of the discarded fetal tissue and to either cremate or bury it. He is not in support to Roe v. Wade. “I long for the day that Roe v. Wade is sent to the ash heap of history,” Pence said. Roe v. Wade has effects right up to the present influencing the public debate on abortion. How could such a mentality even be considered in a supposedly “free” America? The United States prides itself on being a democratic and free nation. This is simply a fallacy when such laws are being imagined and such individuals are being elected to govern.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.
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