Celebrities, high-profile executives and media outlets gunning for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and the state’s new religious freedom law are a “lynch mob,” Newt Gingrich said today in a HuffPost Live [1] interview.
Everyone from singer Miley Cyrus [2] to Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken a shot at Indiana SB 101, legislation that the “lynch mob” has decided opens a universal door for discrimination against gay people.
Gingrich called out the news media as well. “I understand that in most news media that it’s totally legitimate that in most newsrooms in America it is not very acceptable to be deeply committed to traditional values and I understand the mindset.”
“I think the number of people who piled on in Indiana, who never read the bill, had no idea what they were doing,” Gingrich said. “But the word went out, ‘We’re all, whatever it is, we’re against it.’ This week we’re against the color green. Next week, we’ll be against the color blue.”
Grand gestures like Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy’s executive order banning [3] state-funded travel to Indiana are “purely symbolic” and show “selective outrage,” according to Gingrich.
Corporations are playing the hypocrite when they criticize Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he said.
“You know, the head of Apple announces that he’s deeply disappointed. Apple sells cellphones in Saudi Arabia, where being homosexual is a death penalty,” he told HuffPost Live. “Go down the list of countries where all these corporations are quite happy to make money; they don’t posture, they don’t make noise, they don’t protest. But they had a chance to take a cheap shot at Gov. Pence and the state of Indiana and they took their cheap shot.”
If Apple and other companies truly wanted to protest discrimination against gay people, it would stop selling products in countries where being gay is often a death sentence, Gingrich said.
“Part of my point about using the word ‘lynch mob’ is simple,” he told HuffPost Live. “You go to every corporation that complained about Indiana and ask them if they’re prepared to pull out of every country which makes being homosexual illegal and kills you. You look at the Iranian negotiations; it is a death penalty to be homosexual in Iran.”
Pence’s decision to sign the bill into law resulted in a backlash that included a #BoycottIndiana trend on Twitter. Gingrich termed the media firestorm “pure lynch mob psychology” and warned that the country is “at a crossroads … where religious liberty is being subordinated by government to other values.”
The crux of the issue is whether or not people are allowed to live out their religious convictions in this country.
“I want to pose this question to you: Are you allowed in America today to actually believe in your religious beliefs or are you only allowed to believe in the religious beliefs that the elite has decided is acceptable?” Gingrich asked.
“We’re subordinating religion to a different set of values, we are violating the Constitution and we’re doing it with enormous enthusiasm.”
Gingrich was appearing in a bipartisan way with former Obama Green Jobs Czar Van Jones.