USA's Gay Olympian Rebuff's Vice President Pence's Overtures

LOS ANGELES, CA — While Adam Rippon, the first openly gay figure skater to make the U.S. Olympic team, has been fighting for a medal in South Korea, he has also found himself pulled onto the Trump administration’s familiar Twitter battlefield.

The tweets this week about Rippon did not come from the president, who was preoccupied in the White House firing out messages defending an accused wife-beater on his staff. The time it was Vice President Mike Pence on the Twitter machine, reacting to an article in USA Today that said Rippon did not want to meet him because of his anti-gay politics.

Pence has fiercely opposed same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws that protect gay people throughout his political career. He has also appears to have favored funding for gay conversion therapy, a brutal and discredited practice that proponents claim can make gay people straight and is deeply offensive to many in the LGBTQ community.

Pence began denying he ever supported the therapy only recently, long after it became widely condemned by mental health experts and rights groups. As evidence Pence did indeed support the therapy, his critics, including Rippon, point to his 2000 Senate campaign website. It addressed AIDS funding by stating that,"Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior."

The freeze between the athlete and the politician began with the USA Today article, published last month, when Rippon publicly criticized the choice of Pence to lead the United States delegation to the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang.

Rippon said he would prefer not to meet Pence at a planned gathering of American athletes and the official Olympics delegation.

“You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy?” Rippon told USA Today on January 17. “I’m not buying it... If it were before my event, I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren’t a friend of a gay person but that they think that they’re sick.”

Rippon repeated his criticism of Pence on Twitter after his comments to USA Today were published. He told reporters he had no interest in “picking a fight” with the vice president, but he wasn't going to retreat. He tweeted:

End of story? Not quite.

On Wednesday, USA Today reported that the vice president's office had tried to set up a conversation between Pence and Rippon. Depending on who you believe, Pence either never actually reached out and US Today was guilty of reporting fake news or Pence did reach out and doesn't want to admit that Rippon rebuffed his overture with a polite snub.

Pence' had never sought to meet with Rippon, his staff argued.

"#FAKENEWS" Pence tweeted Thursday.

Rippon, his agent and the reporter who wrote the story insisted that, yes, Pence did ask to meet.

"We were contacted by his office and I think the objective was to have a conversation with Adam," the agent, David Baden, told The New York Times.. The skater respectfully declined, he said.

"His job is to be an athlete," Baden added. "His mind is on training, competing and doing his best to represent the U.S. going into the Olympics."

Pence, meanwhile, careful not to criticize a popular Olympian who also happens to be America's newest gay icon and a social media megastar, tweeted a message that implied Rippon was somehow being duped about the conversion therapy issue by the USA Today reporter who wanted to "sow seeds of division."

Pence made one more attempt at winning Rippon's affection, tweeting directly to him:

Christine Brennan, the journalist who wrote the USA Today article, defended her work on Twitter, saying the “report is true and therefore will not be corrected.”

American skier Gus Kenworthy, another openly gay athlete competing this year, got the last word in, however, with an instagram post after the opening ceremony.

Photo: PYEONGCHANG-GUN, SOUTH KOREA - FEBRUARY 07: Adam Rippon of the United States trains during figure skating practice ahead of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games at Gangneung Ice Arena on February 7, 2018 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)