Gay 2020 president candidate Pete Buttigieg slammed on Sunday evening his fellow Hoosier Vice President Mike Pence, who’s notorious for his anti-LGBT record, as a “cheerleader of the porn star presidency.”
Buttigieg made the comments during a CNN town hall event at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin in response to a question from host Jake Tapper on whether Pence would be better or worse than President Trump.
Appearing to struggle to answer as he contemplated the choice, Buttigieg joked, “Does it have to be between those two?”
Buttigieg said the situation was “really strange” because he at simply disagreed with Pence “ferociously,” but now considers him an enabler of Trump.
“I thought he at least believes in our institutions and he’s not personally corrupt, but then how could he get on board with this presidency?” Buttigieg said.
Alluding to Pence’s value of religious freedom even at the expense of enabling anti-LGBT discrimination, Buttigieg said, “His interpretation of scripture is pretty different from mine to begin with.”
“My understand of scripture is that it is about protecting the stranger, the prisoner and the poor person,” Buttigieg said.
“That’s what I get in the gospel when I’m in church, and his has a lot more to do with sexually and a certain view of rectitude,” Buttigieg added.
That’s when Buttigieg delivered the zinger.
“Even if you buy into that, how can he allow himself to be the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?” Buttigieg said.
The remarks were a reference to the $130,000 Trump paid Stormy Daniels in hush money during the 2016 election allegedly to keep silent about a sexual encounter the two had in 2006.
“Is that he stopped believing in scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?” Buttigieg said. “I don’t know.”
Buttigieg, the gay mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Pence, the former governor of Indiana with anti-LGBT record, offer distinct contrasts even though they hail from the same state.
When Pence was governor of Indiana, Buttigieg had a front-row seat to the Pence and his anti-LGBT record, which the former governor has since taken to the White House as Trump’s vice president.
In 2015, Pence signed into a law a “religious freedom” bill allowing individuals and businesses to refuse services to LGBT people. Facing a massive outcry, Pence was eventually forced to sign a “fix” to the law limiting the scope of discrimination.
Buttigieg has consistently been critical of Pence, but has sometimes tempered that view. In a 2017 interview with the Washington Blade, Buttigieg called Pence a “super-nice guy, who just genuinely believes this stuff,” but also said the Vice President pursues “divisive and backward-looking policies.”
Story courtesy of the Washington Blade.