"I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M."

Tweets Trump.

From the NYT report on the tweet:

In his selection, Mr. Trump... gains a partner who is fluent in the ways Washington works, a background that complements Mr. Trump’s outsider status. Before his election as governor in 2012, Mr. Pence had served for six terms in Congress and rose to be the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House....

Mr. Pence brings credibility as a conservative, which should help Mr. Trump in the view of some on the right. A lawyer by training, Mr. Pence has described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”...

He was at the center of a national debate last year over religious freedom laws that critics said invited discrimination against gay couples. In Congress, he pushed to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

ADDED: Here's the post I wrote at the time of that religious freedom debate last year: "Why am I avoiding this Indiana RFRA story?"

I've got to examine my own soul! I see it — e.g., here —  and I know I'm avoiding it. There is something to examine. Why is Indiana getting into so much trouble over a type of law that used to be extremely popular? I guess it has something to do with Hobby Lobby and something to do with all that wedding cake business. There was a time when religionists had the ascendancy, and their pleas for relief from the burdens of generally applicable laws fell on the empathetic ears of conservatives and liberals alike.



Look at how pleased Bill Clinton was to sign what was then perceived as important civil rights legislation.

The tables have turned. And now all the liberals are remembering how much they love Antonin Scalia. I mean, not really, but to be consistent, those who are denouncing hapless Governor Mike Pence should be extolling Scalia who ushered in the era of "Religious Freedom" legislation when he wrote:

We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition. As described succinctly by Justice Frankfurter in Minersville School Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 594-595 (1940):

Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs. The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities.

(Footnote omitted.) We first had occasion to assert that principle in Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), where we rejected the claim that criminal laws against polygamy could not be constitutionally applied to those whose religion commanded the practice. "Laws," we said, are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. . . . Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.

Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).

Okay, I'm working my way through this resistance to the topic. What I see is: A different group is activated now and everything looks different. What I feel is: Exquisitely distanced amusement.