Pete Buttigieg has positioned himself as the religious candidate who doesn’t understand religion.
This spring, the 2020 hopeful said God wouldn’t want to be used as a “cudgel” against either the Right or the Left, just before adding that if the Lord had a political party, it wouldn’t be the Republican one. During the Democratic debates, Buttigieg used his faith to criticize the GOP on immigration and minimum wage.
Now, hoping to round out his biblical misunderstandings, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has employed the Bible to justify abortion. On The Breakfast Club radio show on Friday, Buttigieg repeated his line that the Republican Party has no monopoly on religion, adding that it’s certainly on the wrong side of history when it comes to the abortion debate.
“Right now, they hold everybody in line with this one piece of doctrine about abortion, which is obviously a tough issue for a lot of people to think through morally. Then again, there’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath, and so even that is something that we can interpret differently,” he said.
The Bible also says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” but that’s neither here nor there for Buttigieg, who continued: “I think no matter where you think about the cosmic question of how life begins, most Americans can get on board with the idea of, ‘I might draw the line here, you might draw the line there,’ but the most important thing is the person who should be drawing the line is the woman making the decision.”
So, no matter what you believe about the incredibly morally significant question of when life begins, you should leave it up to the mother. At least Buttigieg isn’t out of place in his party. He echoed the rhetoric of failed 2020 candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who argued, “If you are a person of the Christian faith, one of the tenets of our faith is free will.” This means, apparently, that a woman should have the free will to terminate her pregnancy. (We do have free will, of course. But that doesn’t mean we should use it however we wish against whomever we wish, or that the law should let us.)
As the conversation continued, host Charlamagne Tha God didn’t mean to turn his agreement with Buttigieg into a powerful argument against abortion, but he unironically echoed Dave Chappelle’s quip about the problem of “my body, my choice.”
After explaining that he was pro-choice, Charlamagne Tha God added, “I think that if you’re a man who’s against abortion, you haven’t gotten the wrong woman pregnant. I’m just saying, you’ve had some slip-ups. I’ve had a few.”
Buttigieg chuckled uncomfortably at that misogynist quip, and pivoted the conversation to misogyny in general (“Since when should men be dictating what women ought to be able to do?”). The logic behind Charlamagne’s statement was not going to help with his “life begins with breath” stance. If men support abortion just so they can abdicate their parental responsibilities, and women support it in the name of choice, then the abortion debate really isn’t about when a baby becomes a human at all, is it?
Buttigieg is free to keep peddling his incoherent rationale for supporting abortion, but he might want to think about how easy it is for his reasoning to fall apart. At its logical conclusion, his biblical justification for abortion is as tenuous as a baby’s first breath.
