Mike Pence Fires Back At Adam Rippon After He Allegedly Refuses To Meet VP Before Olympics

Mike Pence Fires Back At Adam Rippon After He Allegedly Refuses To Meet VP Before Olympics

Adam Rippon, the first openly gay U.S. figure skater, reportedly turned down a chance to meet Mike Pence, but the Vice President says Adam wasn’t invited in the first place!

Uh-oh. Ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, Adam Rippon, 28, and Vice President Mike Pence, 58, are tangled up in a messy game of “he said, he said.” After Adam, the first openly gay Winter Olympian, dragged Mike for his anti-LGBT polices during his time as Indiana’s governor, USA Today reported the VP reached out to Adam to set up a meeting where they could have talk it out. Adam reportedly turned Pence down, but now the VP says he never planned such a chat!

“The USA Today report is false and should be corrected. The vice president’s office did not reach out to set up a conversation with Mr. Rippon,” Jarrod Agen, the vice president’s deputy chief of staff and communications director, said in a statement to PEOPLE magazine. “As we’ve said before, the Vice President is supporting all the U.S. athletes in the Olympics and is hoping they all win medals. But this story is just not accurate.”

Well, so much for that. Supposedly, Mike was really upset when Adam said he wasn’t thrilled that the Vice President was leading the United States’ delegation for the Opening ceremony. “You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy? I’m not buying it,” Adam said. To be fair, Mike once supported the use of federal funding to treat people “seeking to change their sexual behavior,” according to Snopes, but he never stated that he supported “gay conversion” therapy.

However, Mike’s politics are so notoriously anti-LGBT that no one should be surprised that Adam wants nothing to do with him. In 2006, Mike said, “societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family” while voicing his support of a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman, according to Time magazine. He opposed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and a law that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in the workplace, saying that it “wages war on freedom and religion in the workplace.” With that political history, it was going to take more than a chat over coffee for Mike and Adam to be besties. Expect these two to give each other the cold shoulder throughout the Winter Olympics.

HollywoodLifers, do you think Adam and Mike should try to bury the hatchet? Or do you think that a meeting would be a waste of time?