Today Pete Buttigieg is polling within the top four candidates nationally and first in Iowa (if near-last among millennials), but back in March, when he first made his case to a national audience during a CNN town hall, “Mayor Pete” was still a nobody. Moderator Jake Tapper asked Buttigieg, who had served as the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, during now-vice president Mike Pence's tenure as the state's governor, whether Pence would make a better president than Donald Trump. In his answer, Buttigieg took the assumptions the evangelical right often makes about gay people — that we're conniving, amoral perverts — and deftly redirected them toward Pence himself.
Pence, who has an extensive anti-LGBTQ record, seemingly “stopped believing in scripture when he started believing Donald Trump,” the mayor mused, making clear that his own interpretation of the Bible is very different than Pence's: “It's about protecting the stranger and the prisoner and the poor person … and his has a lot more to do with sexuality and a certain view of rectitude." Buttigieg implied that Pence was using Christianity to carry out his own weird obsession with, and criminalization of, other people's private intimacies — which would make him quite a hypocrite since he's now “the cheerleader for the porn star presidency.” In Buttigieg's rendering, Pence wasn't the wholesome, Christian family man with good old-fashioned charitable values. Buttigieg was.
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