Mike Pence Denies That Smoking Is Harmful To Your Health (seriously) As Well As Evolution And Climate Change… Other Than That…

During a 2000 congressional race debate, Mike Pence defended an op-ed he wrote arguing that “smoking doesn’t kill.” Pence said there was no direct “scientific causal link medically identifying” a connection between smoking and lung cancer, according to a local newspaper report uncovered by BuzzFeed News.

On Monday, BuzzFeed News reported Pence wrote an op-ed in 1997 equating the health risks associated with cigarettes with those associated with candy.

Pence was defending the tobacco industry, which had been successfully sued by some states to recoup medical expenses related to tobacco. These days he denies climate change is real and man-made.

As an evangelical fundamentalist however Pence believes in a literal Noah’s ark.

Pence, then a local radio and television in Indiana, was running for Congress against opponent Bob Rock, who quizzed Pence over his op-ed according to a local news write up of the debate.

“In his turn, Rock quizzed Pence about an article Pence wrote saying there is no proof cigarettes cause cancer,” Franklin, Indiana’s Daily Journal wrote. “Pence said the article was taken out of context and that while there is no direct ‘scientific causal link medically identifying’ a link between smoking and lung cancer that was not the point of writing it.”

“The trust of that article, Bob, was that we do not need a government large enough in Washington D.C. that can protect me from myself,” Pence said at the debate.

In a 2000 article, “The Great American Smoke out” uncovered by BuzzFeed NewsPence wrote “time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”

As reported in Mother Jones, “Global warming is a myth,” Pence wrote nearly two decades ago in an op-ed unearthed by BuzzFeed. “Environmentalists,” the Indiana Republican explained, “claim that certain ‘greenhouse gases’ like carbon dioxide are mucking up the atmosphere and causing the earth to gradually warm. Despite the fact that CO2 is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature, the greenpeace folks want to blame it all on coal (another natural mineral) and certain (evil) coal burning power plants.” He added (inaccurately) that “the earth is actually cooler today than it was about 50 years ago.”

He doesn’t believe in evolution either. Here’s a 2009 exchange with Chris Matthews, via Huffington Post:

MATTHEWS: Okay, you want to educate the American people about science and its relevance today. Do you believe in evolution, sir?

PENCE: Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that’s in them.

MATTHEWS: Right. But do you believe in evolution as the way he did it?

PENCE: The means, Chris, that he used to do that, I can’t say. But I do believe in that fundamental truth.

When not teaching Bible studies to inform his “science” on smoking and evolution and climate change and gay sex, women, etc., Pence, as reported by Politico, is in bed with Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’ top political group.

[The Kochs] have been holding up Pence’s work in Indiana as emblematic of a conservative reform agenda they’re trying to take nationwide. Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, leads Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a shadowy group known as the Kochs’ “secret bank.” Pence regularly speaks at Koch fundraising events.

And that’s probably why, since he is bought and paid for by Big Oil and Big Coal, he may not believe in global warming.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace