An Iowa Democrat who pledged to caucus for Pete Buttigieg was shocked to find he was openly gay and subsequently asked to withdraw support for him.
A video circulating on social media Tuesday morning shows a Buttigieg caucus precinct captain, Nikki van den Heever, trying to assist a woman who was surprised to discover the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was married to another man, Chasten Buttigieg.
“So, are you saying that he has a same-sex partner?” the voter asked. When van den Heever responded in the affirmative, the woman remarked, “Are you kidding? Well then, I don’t want anybody like that in the White House! So, can I have my card back?”
Van den Heever offered to ask someone else to help and tried to discuss the woman’s objections to Buttigieg’s marriage. “The whole point of it is though, he’s a human being, right, just like you and me, and it shouldn’t really matter,” van den Heever said.
“Well, he better read the Bible,” the woman said.
“He does, and he says that God doesn’t choose a political party,” van den Heever answered before the woman interrupted to ask, “Why does it say in the Bible that a man should marry a woman then?”
The voter said she was surprised to have never heard about Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, but van den Heever assured her this was widely known.
“I guess what I would like you to just dig deep inside and think like, should it matter if it’s a woman or if it’s a man or if they’re heterosexual or homosexual if you believe in what they say? That’s my question,” van den Heever said.
But the woman was unwilling to change her mind. “It all just went right down the toilet is where it all just went,” she said.
“What I teach my son is that love is love, and we’re all human beings,” van den Heever is heard saying before the end of the clip.
