Vice President Pence and his family arrived for vacation at a home near Aspen on Tuesday, and neighbors had a message for him: "Make America Gay Again." "You couldn't miss it," Pitkin County Sheriff's deputy Michael Buglione tells the Aspen Times regarding a rainbow banner hung on a stone pillar near the Pences' driveway. Pence once said same-sex marriage was akin to "societal collapse" and opposed a law banning discrimination against gay people in the workplace. According to an October article in the New Yorker, President Trump reportedly said Pence "wants to hang" all gay people. One of the neighbors tells the Times that the banner was the idea of their daughters and one of their daughters' girlfriends.
Sheriff Joe DiSalvo says a deputy was there when one of the neighbors hung the 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 says. When that didn't happen, DiSalvo says the neighbors provided deputies and Secret Service agents with chili and corn muffins. "They've been really nice to us," he says. Buglione says neither deputies nor agents had a problem with the banner. "This town had a history of irreverence when it came to our visitors," DiSalvo says. "We seem to have lost that a bit, but this is an extension of that." The banner isn't the first LGBTQ protest Pence has faced since becoming vice president," the Hill reports. Protesters held a "queer dance party" outside his home in DC last January. (More Mike Pence stories.)