South Bend, Indiana mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg sat down on CNN’s New Day to talk about his potential run and went after vice president and former Indiana governor Mike Pence for his anti-LGBTQ views.
Said Buttigieg: “He genuinely believes things that most of us would consider really far out. He’s written that he thinks that cigarettes don’t kill. He seems to believe people like me just get up and decide to be gay. His worldview is one that is way out of step with the American mainstream.”
Buttigieg brought up Pence’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act which threw the state into chaos, drawing nationwide boycotts and attention: “We saw that in Indiana when he really embarrassed our state with policies that both Democrats and Republicans in not just the political world but the business community stepped up and said ‘hey you’re making us look like a backwards place at just the moment we’re trying to advance.’ Unfortunately he now has a stage for some of those fanatical social ideas.”
Of his candidacy as a gay man, Buttigieg added: “I recognize that there’s a historic quality to this candidacy if and when we run. But what I learned in the process in South Bend when I got reelected with 80 percent of the vote is that most people just care if you’re going to do a good job or not.”
CNN’s Kate Bolduan interviewed Buttigieg several days ago, and his husband Chasten as well.
Said Chasten, who took the last name Buttigieg when they married, on the campaign trail: “My marriage is the most important thing in my life. It exists by the grace of a single vote on the US Supreme Court. It is one of the reasons why I feel so intimately why politics matters.”
Chasten told Bolduan: “The reason I fell in love with Pete is because he’s the same person on the trail or at home. I’m really excited for the country to get to know him on a much larger scale because he’s just a breath of fresh air.”
Added Pete Buttigieg: “It’s not lost on me that at no point in the last, probably, a hundred years would somebody like me be taken even a little bit seriously. Something’s different right now and I’m not going to miss this moment.”
