On Sunday evening, Pete Buttigieg announced that he was ending his campaign to become the Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency. The former South Bend, Indiana mayor made history as the country’s first openly gay politician to become a legitimate presidential contender. In the Iowa caucuses last month, he bested every other candidate, and came a close second to frontrunner Bernie Sanders in the subsequent New Hampshire primary.
As a gay conservative journalist covering the 2020 campaign from Washington, D.C., I’ve followed Buttigieg’s campaign with special interest. Over my lifetime, I’ve certainly seen my share of traditional right-wing homophobia. And so I never imagined that when a gay man finally had a legitimate shot at becoming president, the loudest attacks on his identity would come not from the Right, but from the Left. While Buttigieg’s politics, qualifications, record and platform all were open to good-faith criticism, many of the “woke” progressive journalists and activists who opposed his candidacy went beyond this, and resorted to personal attacks that blurred into outright bigotry.
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