Jennifer Lawrence lashed out at Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, for his support of conversion therapy and opposition to gay marriage at an awards ceremony in New York on Saturday night.
The movie star, who was attending the 2024 GLAAD Media Awards to celebrate her “favorite musician and good friend Orville Peck,” took to the stage to express her love for the gay community.
“I love seeing so many humans who can be the best in their field and at the same time be the worst,” Lawrence said.
Speaking candidly about how she once fell in love with a gay man “whom she tried to convert for years,” she found an opportunity to attack Pence after stating, “I know conversion therapy doesn’t work.”
‘Did you hear me, Mike Pence? “I said conversion therapy isn’t real, even though I know you think it worked on you,” he said.
Jennifer Lawrence attacked Trump’s former vice president at the GLAAD Media Awards in New York on Saturday night.
Lawrence criticized Pence, stating that “conversion therapy doesn’t work.” In 2000, Pence publicly advocated for programs that offered assistance to people seeking to change their sexual behaviors.
He’s in New York tonight. She’s getting a Kid’s Choice award for weirdest shit.
In accepting the award, Peck spoke about being a singer-songwriter in a genre that hasn’t always been the most open to the LGBTQ community.
“I’m one of many here who have felt excluded or repressed for being who we are,” Peck said, adding that queer people nevertheless manage to “turn tragedy into art, humor and culture.”
Pence, the former governor of Indiana, married to his wife Karen since 1985, has been criticized by LGBTQ activists for more than two decades for supporting conversion therapy and opposing gay marriage.
Pence also reportedly supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as governor of Indiana, which was criticized as anti-LGBTQ legislation.
In 2000, Pence publicly advocated for programs that offered assistance to people seeking to change their sexual behaviors, which many saw as encouragement for conversion therapy.
He called on Congress to “support reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act only after completing an audit to ensure that federal dollars are no longer given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spread of the HIV virus.”
“Resources should be directed to those institutions that provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” he added.
Nearly two decades later, the former vice president opposed same-sex marriage and supported a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
Pence, pictured with his wife Karen, also opposed the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibited soldiers from openly identifying as gay.
Additionally, he was against a law that would have banned discrimination against LGBTQ people in the workplace.
Pence also opposed repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prohibited soldiers from openly identifying as gay.
More recently, as part of his 2024 presidential bid, Pence said that as president he would again ban transgender Americans from serving in the military, as was the policy when he was vice president under Donald Trump: “…having transgender personnel, I think, erodes unit cohesion in a unique way.”
The politician has been criticized for his controversial views on several occasions, including an incident in which US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg condemned Pence’s discrimination towards the LGBTQ community.
‘If being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s what I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand,” he said at a national LGBTQ Victory Fund champagne brunch in 2019.
‘I don’t know what’s in his heart. If you’re in public office and you promote homophobic policies, at some level it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it out of political calculation or out of sincere belief.’
“The problem is that it’s hurting other people,” Buttigieg added.
There is no scientific evidence to support the practice of conversion therapy, which attempts to change the sexual orientation of LGBTQ people, either psychologically or spiritually.
The practice has also been widely discredited by medical and mental health organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, who say conversion therapy can be dangerous.
Supporters of this harmful practice claim that it can “repair” someone’s attraction to the same gender and make them “straight.”
Medical associations have said that the idea of conversion therapy was based on the idea that homosexuality is a disorder, an idea “that has been rejected by all major mental health professions.”
