The Hill article gives more context on how the Pences were thinking about this, at least back in 2002. Pence told the paper he often refused dinner or cocktail invitations from male colleagues, too: “It’s about building a zone around your marriage,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a predatory town, but I think you can inadvertently send the wrong message by being in [certain] situations.”

The 2002 article notes that Pence arrived in Congress a half decade after the 1994 “Republican revolution,” when Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House. Several congressional marriages, including Gingrich’s, encountered difficulty that year. Pence seemed wary of this. “I’ve lost more elections than I’ve won,” he said. “I’ve seen friends lose their families. I’d rather lose an election.” He even said he gets fingers wagged in his face by concerned Indianans. “Little old ladies come and say, ‘Honey, whatever you need to do, keep your family together,’” he told The Hill.

These comments show that the Pences have a distinctively conservative approach toward family, sex, and gender. This is by no means the way that all Christians, or even all evangelical Christians like the Pences, navigate married life. But traditional religious people from other backgrounds may practice something similar. Many Orthodox Jews follow the laws of yichud, which prohibit unmarried men and women from being alone in a closed room together. Some Muslim men and women also refuse to be together alone if they’re not married. These practices all have different histories and origins, but they’re rooted in the same belief: The sanctity of marriage should be protected, and sexual immorality should be guarded against at all costs.

That idea might seem disorienting to more socially progressive Americans. For one thing, it shows a deep awareness of gender and sexuality: The implication is that temptations to flirt or cheat are present in everyday interactions.

Some journalists on Twitter quickly pointed out that Pence’s rules may function, in practice, to perpetuate professional and political disadvantages against women. If men in power can meet alone with other men but not women, they’ll just keep doing the business of being powerful in an all-male world. And it parallels critiques of the Billy Graham Rule that’ve been leveled within the evangelical community, as well, where it’s also been blamed for subjecting professional relationships to the logic of a sexually permissive society.

Other critics connected these views to Pence’s stance on LGBT issues. When he was governor of Indiana, he presided over a controversial religious-freedom bill that, LGBT advocates claimed, would have allowed business owners to discriminate against them. Pence’s marriage rules implicitly suggest there’s a temptation in being alone with women, but not in being alone with men, which is not the experience of a lot of people, including LGBT Christians.