CLIO, Michigan — Pete Buttigieg’s brother-in-law is accusing the gay Democratic presidential hopeful of hijacking his family’s history for political advantage by crafting a bogus backstory of poverty, homelessness, and homophobia.
Rhyan Glezman, 34, a pastor in small-town Michigan, said he was inundated by death threats and hate mail when stories surfaced this month claiming he was a bigot who had fallen out with his younger brother Chasten when Chasten came out of the closet.
The reports were based on a Washington Post article, which described how Chasten, 29, was forced out of the family home and never reconciled with his two brothers.
But rather than rejecting his brother Chasten, a would-be “first gentleman,” Glezman, who has run the Clio Community Church for the past two years, said his family has been loving and supportive throughout.
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“A mayor from a small city and his husband, a child who grew up with nothing and his parents kicked him out … it makes a perfect political story for the campaign,” he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner at his church in Clio. “To me that’s very sad. If that’s all you have to stand on, you’re not fit to be president of the United States.”
The gray church building stands on the outskirts of Clio, a town of about 2,600 people, along a road of sporting goods stores and nondescript restaurant chains. Inside, worshipers are greeted by a verse from Romans: “The pain that you’ve been feeling can’t compare with the joy that’s coming.” Evangelical services are held in a traditional prayer space or, for more enthusiastic participants, in the gym.
Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., since 2012, emerged from relative obscurity to establish himself as a presidential contender with a compelling story. Although initially light on policies, he was the subject of a string of glowing profiles. Several focused on Chasten, who met the presidential hopeful on the dating app Hinge in 2015.
“Chasten Buttigieg has been a homeless community college student and a Starbucks barista,” the Washington Post stated. “Now, he could be ‘first gentleman.'”
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But its reference to Glezman’s opposition to gay marriage — based he says on a Biblical interpretation of what the institution means — misrepresented complicated family relationships, he said. What particularly stung, he added, was a line suggesting he or his other brother Dustin had effectively disowned Chasten by saying: “No brother of mine … ”
Visibly pained, Glezman said: “Do I love him? Absolutely. He is my brother.” He said, “You can’t change that. Just because we have a disagreement doesn’t change that.”
[Also read: Buttigieg and husband want children: ‘Chasten is made to be a dad’]
Glezman said no one had been particularly shocked when Chasten came out as gay. In fact it helped them make sense of his studious nature in a family of outdoorsmen, according to Glezman. Nor was his family particularly religious — “We went to church at Easter and Christmas” — or the type to banish a son into homelessness.
“He went away,” is how Glezman put it. “He was struggling for a time. But there was nothing on the family end that said he had to leave.”
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Glezman was particularly angered, he added, by accounts suggesting the family was poor and that Chasten went without as he was growing up. It was little more than an example of playing the “victim card” for political gain.
“The story makes it look as if he came from nothing, a poor family,” he said. “Chasten had everything, from cellphones paid for, car insurance paid for.”
Glezman’s bond with his brothers, added the married father of one, was marked by a tattoo of a cross on his arm inscribed, “Forever.” And he explained how he treated his younger brother to a trip to an amusement park for his 21st birthday. “Would I do that if we didn’t have a relationship?”
They last hugged at the funeral for their grandmother a year ago. Glezman said he has hosted his brother’s previous boyfriends and that he went to a baseball game with Chasten and Pete Buttigieg last year.
Glezman was not prepared for the reaction to the Washington Post story and how what he views as a lie spread like wildfire online. Hateful missives arrived by email and text. Vitriol was posted on Facebook and Twitter. “There was one that said I should go out to the woodshed and kill myself,” he said.
[Also read: Socialist pastor says Buttigieg’s ‘Christian leftism plays into the hands of the religious right’]
It was all part of a public discourse, Glezman believes, that frequently writes off principled Christians as bigots. “I believe for me, as a Christian, we’re the people being shunned, people being silenced, and a lot of the liberal side of things are becoming the bigots to Christianity and faith,” he said. “They are becoming the intolerant side.”
With his 332,000-plus Twitter followers, Chasten Buttigieg is a national celebrity. Glezman’s followers number just 86 at the time of this writing.
Although he has voted for Democratic candidates in the past, Glezman backed Donald Trump in 2016.
Buttigieg need not count on his vote this time around.
“That’s not because he’s gay,” he said. “When you want to rewrite the Electoral College, when you want to change the makeup of the Supreme Court, when you want to have open borders and not have any process there, his extreme view on abortion … those are things that are very important to me.”
