Joy Behar gives on-air apology to Mike Pence, Christians for calling their faith ‘a mental illness’

ABC’s The View commentator Joy Behar apologized publicly for characterizing Vice President Mike Pence’s Christianity as a “mental illness” on a recent broadcast. She did so after first apologizing to the Vice President privately and being encouraged by him to apologize to all Christians.

“I think Vice-President Mike Pence is right,” Behar said on the show. “I was raised to respect everyone’s religious faith and I fell short of that. I sincerely apologize for what I said.”

Check out the clip below.

Pence told Sean Hannity how he had asked Behar for a public apology.

“I felt it was important that I defend the faith of tens-of-millions of Americans against that kind of slander,” he said, referring to him asking Behar to apologize publicly.

Pence had responded to the “mental illness” remark, saying the remark was “just wrong.”

“I’d like to laugh about it, but I really can’t,” the Vice President told Mike Allen of Axios.  He emphasized that The View’s deriding his Christianity is “an insult not to me, but to the vast majority of the American people who like me cherish their faith.”

The View participants were discussing former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman’s comment that the Vice President “thinks Jesus tells him to say things.”

“It’s one thing to talk to Jesus. It’s another thing when Jesus talks to you,” Joy Behar ridiculed.  “That’s called mental illness, if I’m not correct, hearing voices.”

“It’s just simply wrong for ABC to have a television program that expresses that kind of religious intolerance,” Pence responded a day later.  “I’d like to be light about it, but I really can’t – not for my sake, but for the tens of millions of Americans who cherish their faith, I just, I can’t be silent.”