Mike Pence ran a conservative think tank and publication that published anti-gay articles and also denounced the presence of AIDS activists at the 1996 Republican National Convention.
As president of the Indiana Policy Review from 1991 to 1994, Pence implicitly sanctioned anti-gay articles that called on gay journalists to out themselves to expose their ‘bias' and conflated homosexuality with pedophilia and disease. Right Wing Watch reports:
In one item titled “The Pinked Newsroom,” published in the December 1993 issue, the publication lamented that The Wall Street Journal took part in a job fair for gay journalists. The piece claimed that “gaydom” was a “pathological condition” and argued that LGBT editors and reporters should not keep their sexuality a secret because it might slant their coverage. “[T]he more extreme of the gay movement consider themselves members of a sexual determined political party,” the piece explained.
A few months earlier, in August 1993, the journal, with Pence on the masthead, published a piece objecting to the idea of gay people serving in the military. The article, written by Col. Ronald Ray, a senior fellow at the [name foundation], stated that “homosexuals are not as a group able bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”
The article went on to list what the author described as “‘gay' sexual practices” in great detail. It then claimed that proponents of allowing gays to serve in the military ignore “counter-espionage case histories involving homosexuals who became traitors through blackmail.”
Finally, Ray attempted to link homosexuality to pedophilia by citing NAMBLA and quoting a publication which claimed that “the love between man and boys is at the foundation of homosexuality.”
Documents unearthed by RWW also show that Pence penned a piece back in the October-November 1996 issue of Indiana Policy Review in which he bemoaned that year's GOP convention as being “an endless line of pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and proponents of Affirmative Action.”
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The “AIDS activists” Pence refers to were an HIV positive female former Ford administration staffer and a 6 year-old child who was born with HIV.
But as RWW notes, those were likely not the activists Pence was really referring to: “His objection was likely that at the time, HIV/AIDS was still viewed as a gay issue. Pence clearly did not consider LGBT individuals part of the “pro-family” party he envisioned the GOP to be.”
