Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, a magna cum laude Harvard grad, a Rhodes scholar, a Navy Lieutenant, a Joyce aficionado, an Episcopalian, a polyglot, and a former McKinsey consultant.
He’s also gay, which surely matters quite a bit in his own lived experiences. But to voters, what difference should that make? He’s in his 30s and recently married with two dogs. In the post-Obergefell world and one that I think most millennials want to live in, Buttigieg’s personal life should matter as much or as little as anyone else’s.
But Buttigieg has come under fire from the Left for the crime of — believe me, it pains me more to write this than for you to read it — not being gay enough. At the Outline, Jacob Bacharach deemed Buttigieg “bad for gays,” citing his “unthreatening, socially acceptable, vaguely conservative gay identity.” In a Slate piece originally headlined “Is Pete Buttigieg just another white male candidate, or does his gayness count as diversity?” Christina Cauterucci lamented his “conform[ity] to a critical mass of gendered expectations” and apparent refusal to subscribe to “the idea of gayness as a cultural framework, formative identity, or anything more than a category of sexual and romantic behavior.”
This should really go without saying, but it shouldn’t be disqualifying for Buttigieg not to live up to specific stereotypes. Right? Yet here we have a call for him to start acting gay-er in public.
Meanwhile, over in Berlin, former President Barack Obama is undergoing a reckoning, telling a town hall:
Obama’s correct, and Buttigieg has unfortunately found himself in the crosshairs of that circular firing squad. Once upon a time, the American Left waged social wars in the name of tolerance, but now it punishes anyone who fails to live up or down to whatever social demographic they’re supposed to identify with. We’ve seen this as the feminist Left has come to reject women whose figures they see as “body shaming,” and now Buttigieg faces far-left ire for failing to be the right kind of gay man.
Buttigieg has railed against Vice President Mike Pence in recent days, despite his having had an excellent working relationship with Pence in Indiana, to the point that Buttigieg could find nary an anecdote to prove Pence had been anything less than gracious to him. Yet all the heat Buttigieg has actually faced over his homosexuality seems to be coming from the Left.
[Also read: Pete Buttigieg, a fan of Chick-Fil-A chicken]
