“It’s a yes or no question!” Stephanopoulos pressed.
“Look . . . Hoosiers . . . Come on . . .” the governor stammered, in an almost pleading tone. “Hoosiers don’t believe in discrimination.”
Still trying to get a yes-or-no answer, Stephanopoulos asked the question again—and then again. No matter how many times he was asked, Pence would not simply say that the answer was no. (Which means he probably believed the answer was yes, but at least knew not to admit it.) One national columnist later described it as “very possibly one of the worst appearances by a governor in television history.”
The rest of the day, I tried in the back of my mind to reconcile what I had just seen on-screen with the Mike Pence I knew, a man who had always been gracious and decent to me in person, and eager to cooperate on economic matters. Most of my interactions with Republican politicians were exercises in coming to view someone more charitably, building understanding, goodwill, and appreciation as we acknowledged our differences and sought common ground. This time, the reverse was true, as I watched someone I felt I knew well go on to embarrass himself and our whole state. We all knew that the governor was very conservative, and his policy positions on any social issue were rarely a surprise. But was he really incapable of saying—even pretending—that he believed discrimination should not be legal?
My own moral outrage compounded the fact that he had just made my job, as a mayor intent on growing our community as an inclusive and welcoming place, more difficult. We suddenly appeared backward by association, along with every other community in the state. The bill would preempt local laws like our local nondiscrimination ordinance, and send a message that people living in our city could not expect to be treated equally. Notre Dame, which competes in recruiting not just with other colleges but with other college towns, would have a harder time selling South Bend. If Memorial Hospital needed to attract a specialist in pediatric cancer, or I needed to get a brilliant policy specialist to come work for the city, the state’s reputation would be a new hurdle. And it wasn’t just about high-flying educated experts who might turn their nose up at our state’s license to discriminate. It was also a blow to some of our most vulnerable residents—like a teenager at one of our high schools, already in the incredibly difficult process of facing her sexuality or gender identity, now being told that the state would not protect her rights.
Jay Leno threatened to cancel an upcoming show here. Our Convention and Visitors Bureau director, Rob DeCleene, fought back tears at a community meeting a few days after the bill passed, insisting that he would continue to try to show that our city was a welcoming place. The alarmed director of our Studebaker National Museum forwarded me an email from one of her top donors, indicating he would likely remove the museum from his will. “I don’t, for a minute, suggest that Museum [sic] is complicitous,” he wrote. “But I do feel it is up to every individual and institution in the state to make a stand against this kind of bigotry. . . .”
The only way to avoid South Bend getting lumped in with the rest of the state was to be vocal. Soon I was standing in a downtown diner for a quickly assembled news conference with a number of civic voices. The diversity of the group spoke for itself; an activist with dyed-orange hair, a Navy veteran, the president of our baseball team, a Jewish grandmother, and the CEO of a locally based insurance company, all stood at my side as I sought to reassure members of the LGBT community that they were safe in South Bend, and called on the state to reverse course.
My office distributed stickers reading COME ON IN: SOUTH BEND IS AN OPEN CITY and they quickly began appearing in restaurant and shop windows across town. Businesses from the South Bend Brew Werks to the Blackthorn Golf Club signed up on a list of companies reaffirming their commitment to serve all. And I found myself on national TV and radio discussing just the kind of national social issue that had rarely been on my plate as a mayor.
Like all furors, this one, too, had its comic dimensions. In Walkerton, about half an hour from South Bend, the owner of a place called Memories Pizza answered a question from a local TV reporter and unexpectedly became the first Indiana businessperson to suggest publicly that he’d use the law to avoid catering a gay wedding. The Internet erupted with angry responses, largely in the form of zero-star Yelp reviews. The content of the posts ranged from simple outrage, to obscene images composed of pizza toppings, to expressions of puzzlement over what circumstances would lead a gay couple to ask a rural pizza place to cater their wedding in the first place. Late-night TV had a field day, with Michael Keaton playing the pizza owner on Saturday Night Live, turning away customers with a wagged finger in a goofy spoof of CNN’s reporting style.
The reaction quickly went over the top, with threats to burn the place down prompting them to close for a few days—not something likely to inspire the owners toward a more forward-looking attitude on tolerance and equality. As things grew more fierce, I began to feel a kind of regret for the owner and his adult daughter, who probably had no idea that their unguarded words to a local camera crew would make them a national lightning rod. But I needn’t have worried about them. They set up a GoFundMe.com page to cover the costs of their closure and promptly raised $800,000. (The entire property of Memories Pizza, including the land and the building, had been assessed at around $40,000 in value.) Only in America in 2015 could a small-town pizza provider profess prejudice in the name of Christianity before a local TV crew, be mocked around the country on late-night television, and then be made rich beyond belief, all in a matter of days. “Indiana pizza better be good f****** pizza, that’s all I can say,” Jon Stewart opined in disbelief.
As I watched all this unfold, my mind turned to the people I knew—older conservatives, mostly—who were on the road to acceptance of LGBT equality but had sincere difficulty in getting there. What would my next-door neighbors think of all this? If my grandmother, who had voted for Reagan but been turned off by Gingrich, were living, would the contours of this debate make her more or less likely to embrace equality? How could we make it clear that there was no going back on equality, without seeming so ferocious to these citizens that we pushed them straight back into the arms of the religious right? The swift social change was exhilarating, but its suddenness would disorient many Americans, which increased the risk of backlash. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni noted, “A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.”
But, amid the divisiveness, the RFRA debate actually helped to bring people together across traditional party lines. Because the law’s endorsement of discrimination was so naked and harmful, it aroused opposition from conservatives who may have struggled with something like marriage equality but at least recognized that it’s wrong to mistreat someone because of who they are or whom they love. The activism of longtime progressives and LGBT advocates was crucial, but I believe it was ultimately the revolt of the business Republicans that changed the course of this debate.
On March 31, five days after the bill passed, the often conservative Indianapolis Star carried a rare front-page editorial, headlined in letters so big they almost took up the entire page:
FIX
THIS
NOW