Mike Pence

In Shortest Way Home, Pete Buttigieg’s memoir, Pence appears as the Indiana governor behind the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the bill that drives the book’s chapter on discrimination and LGBT rights. Buttigieg recounts how, after a national backlash, the Republican state assembly “hastily composed a clarification” specifying the law could not justify discrimination — and how the bill’s original backers complained that the clarification defeated its whole purpose. Buttigieg reads that objection as the revealing moment: “contrary to Pence’s protestations, discrimination had been at the heart of their project all along.”

Context: Mike Pence is a former Vice President of the United States (2017–2021) under Donald Trump and was Governor of Indiana (2013–2017) when the RFRA controversy unfolded in 2015.

Where this appears

• Shortest Way Home — Pence as the Indiana governor whose RFRA bill anchors the book’s account of discrimination and LGBT rights; the “clarification” episode exposes discrimination as the bill’s underlying aim.