Mayor Pete on growing up gay

A kind of war

In a speech before an audience of LGBT rights supporters on Sunday, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, did not describe being gay as something he always believed was acceptable. 

Nor did he dismiss lingering questions about his viability as a presidential candidate in a country in which three in 10 adults still say they have some reservations or would be very uncomfortable with a gay candidate, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in February.

Instead, he described wrestling with his sexual orientation as “a kind of war” — one he said he was only able to win when he came home from serving in Afghanistan. 

As a youngster in high school and college, he said, the situation was very different.

“If you could have offered me a pill that could make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you could give me a swig of water,” Buttigieg said at the LGBTQ Victory Fund’s annual brunch. 

“It’s a hard thing to think about now. If you had shown me exactly what it was that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.”

. . . .

On the trail, Buttigieg has emphasized how he and his husband are similar, not different, from heterosexual couples across the country, hoping to defuse an issue that evangelicals and other opponents of same-sex marriage could raise if he becomes the nominee. 

Taking direct swipes at Vice President Mike Pence, he said his marriage last year to schoolteacher Chasten Buttigieg had made him a better man, “and yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.

“That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand: That if you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me,” Buttigieg said. 

“Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”

I wonder if Pence would reply like a traditional Catholic that no one is responsible for his sexual orientation, but only for his actual sexual behavior.

That is a view developed and expounded by a clergy that for centuries has proclaimed clerical celibacy and apparently has mostly lied about it.

Anyway, Pete's remarks have not pleased all gays.

Not those for whom wild promiscuity and the most debauched raunch is essential to their understanding of what it is to be gay.

But others are on his side.