Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed as “slanderous” Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg’s suggestion that Vice President Mike Pence is “homophobic.”
“This is a fundamentally decent man who, just as I described, shares the administration’s view with respect to how every human being should be treated,” Pompeo told talk radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday. “To say anything different from that is both false and frankly slanderous.”
Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., is married and vying to be the first openly gay president. Since he declared his candidacy, he has repeatedly targeted Pence, whose tenure as Indiana governor saw a national controversy over a religious freedom bill that gay rights activists denounced as bigoted.
“He advances homophobic policies,” Buttigieg said last week during his own appearance on Hewitt’s show. “So you know, if you’re in public office and you advance homophobic policies, on some level it doesn’t matter whether you do that out of political calculation or whether you do it out of sincere belief. The problem is it’s hurting other people.”
Hewitt gave Pompeo a chance to repudiate those remarks by asking about openly gay U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell’s diplomatic initiative to decriminalize homosexuality around the world, including in Iran.
“It’s been President Trump’s priority since the beginning of his administration,” Pompeo said. “I was asked about this during my confirmation hearing, and we made very clear every human being all around the world needs to be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve, just because of their God-given rights as a human being. We are staunchly working to protect those rights everywhere we act.” He added that Pence supports those efforts.
Buttigieg acknowledged to Hewitt that Pence has “always been polite to me in person” but downplayed the significance of niceties. “He, to this day, cannot bring himself to say that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against people who are gay or that I should have been allowed to serve and put my life on the line in the military, as I was, even though he said very nice things about my service,” he said. “And he hasn’t even gone on the record to say whether he believes that my family should be broken up or my marriage should be ended or not.”
Pence’s team responded to Buttigieg’s initial attacks by maintaining that the two men had a “largely positive relationship” prior to the mayor’s presidential run.
“At no point in their years-long professional relationship did Mayor Pete ever publicly or privately criticize any perceived view the then-governor held to him,” a Pence associate told the Washington Examiner last month. “It’s only now that he’s running for national office that it seems a day can’t go by without Pete attacking Mike Pence, while talking out of the other side of his mouth about the need for ‘civility’ and Christian behavior in our politics.”
[Related: Mike Pence says Mayor Pete Buttigieg is attacking ‘my Christian faith’]
