Progressive Ponder If Being Gay Makes Pete Buttigieg Sufficiently Intersectional

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I disagree with Mayor Pete on a number of policy issues, but it’s interesting to see the left struggle with whether his being gay is enough to make up for still being a white male, or to raise the issue of whether he is gay enough.

(The original tweet that Guy Benson and others in the thread were taking issue with has now been removed by the poster.)

More.

The left is clearly of two minds on this, or maybe it’s liberals vs. progressives. Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times:

“The author is asserting that Buttigieg, 37, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., doesn’t come across as particularly gay, meaning . . . what? That he lacks stereotypical mannerisms? That his voice isn’t high-pitched? I’m kind of floored, because I and other gay people around my age (54) or older spent most of our lives educating people about the bigotry and inaccuracy of those very stereotypes and trumpeting the message — the truth! — that gay people can be every bit as buttoned-down and strait-laced as, well, Pete Buttigieg! Now his divergence from those stereotypes is deemed remarkable and in need of dissection? Strange days indeed.”

14 Comments for “Progressive Ponder If Being Gay Makes Pete Buttigieg Sufficiently Intersectional”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    [Snort.]

    Of all things, Guy Benson, a conservative twinkie who doesn’t think that equal treatment of gays and lesbians is worth his time or energy**, carrying on about how a Salon article that is, a best, nonsense, disrespects a gay Democratic presidential candidate who seems, at this early stage of the game, to be reasonably well received.

    Talk about the silly season.

    **From “A Fox News Contributor On Being Gay, The GOP, And Religious Liberty” — “Gay rights is not something that dominates my attentions — or my passions — and that may seem incongruous, that may seem counterintuitive to a lot of people,” he said, “but the issues that I care about most undergird the reasons why I’m a conservative and have been forever and will be a conservative moving forward.” Right, Guy.

    • posted by Jorge on

      **From “A Fox News Contributor On Being Gay, The GOP, And Religious Liberty” — “Gay rights is not something that dominates my attentions — or my passions — and that may seem incongruous, that may seem counterintuitive to a lot of people,” he said, “but the issues that I care about most undergird the reasons why I’m a conservative and have been forever and will be a conservative moving forward.” Right, Guy.

      I cannot understand your beef with this.

      …or is it that you’re accusing Mr. Benson of being a hypocrite? Ludicrous. Gays are allowed to have personal opinions about the fair treatment of gays without having political opinions about what government does about the matter. It would be the equivalent of a woman being personally pro-life (and thus she would never have an abortion) taking no position on abortion laws. But that doesn’t mean she can’t condemn someone for their choice to have an abortion without you calling her a hypocrite for not voting on the issue.

      The growing divergence between the personal and the political is one of the biggest faults of the past 20-odd years.

      • posted by Jorge on

        The growing divergence between the personal and the political…

        I mean the growing convergence.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      I cannot understand your beef with this.

      Clearly not. Bensen’s crocodile-tear level concern for Buttigieg’s treatment is something akin to Kellyanne Conway’s crocodile-tear concern about “Creepy Uncle Joe”.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Huh?

      Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jorge.

      Guy Bensen is a conservative homosexual (a) who only marginally (at best) supports marriage equality, employment non-discrimination, public accommodations non-discrimination and the whole range of pro-equality issues, (b) who has made it clear that gay/lesbian issues aren’t important to him, (c) who supports a political party and political movement that is insistently anti-equality while resisting any efforts to integrate/include gays and lesbians into party leadership, and then suddenly, because a few fringe progressives are blowing gas out of their asses about intersectionality, Bensen becomes “Mr. Gay”, all concerned about how badly the fringe progressives are treating Buttigieg.

      Its unadulterated bullshit, is what it is.

      Kellyanne Conway is a woman who has loudly supported/excused President Trump on/for his mistreatment/abuse of women over the years, and then suddenly becomes “Ms Me Too” when Joe Biden is accused of improper conduct well below the “grab ’em by the pussy” threshold.

      She’s full of shit, too.

      If you don’t see the parallel between the two yappers, I can’t help you.

      • posted by Jorge on

        You seem to be demonstrating a way of inferring morality and sincerity from politics.

        It is strange and should not be considered rational.

  2. posted by Mike King & David "TJ" Bauler on

    Fred Karger (sic?) ran in the GOP presidential primary some time ago and was given a largely cold, if not hostile, reception by the ‘Party Of Inclusion’.

    Mayor Pete is not going to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination, but most primary voting Democrats will not be cold, or hostile to his candidacy. I’m just saying….

  3. posted by Jorge on

    John Aravsosis… I forgot why I don’t like him. For some reason his name’s setting off the “I hate his guts” reaction I usually reserve only for Michael Signorelli.

    Oh, him.

    “As 538’s Nate Silver put it, “it’s a big deal that an openly gay man is a serious contender for a major party’s presidential nomination, and if you’re a liberal who wants to equivocate about that too much, you can pretty much fuck right off.””

    Yeah, but good God, this happens every single presidential race with multiple major presidential candidates (and some VP candidates), right or left, who don’t have their hair gel pressed as perfectly as Mitt Romney, and a fair number of candidates who do.

    In 2000 it was Joe Lieberman being a slam dunk, except he was Jewish, and George W. Bush being a little too Jesus-happy during a debate.

    Half of 2004’s Democratic primary was equivocation about whether it was a capital offense to ever be conciliatory toward the right because of how awful Bush supposedly was. Kerry (of the perfectly coiffed hair) wound up winning on electability (not being too partisan-sounding), at the cost of his supporters not having as much enthusiasm.

    In 2008, Barack Obama had enormous attention over his race and the finer points on where he stood on racial and other identity issues. Sarah Palin of the lipstick hockey moms had nothing more substantive behind the media elite’s sneer than the infamous “what books do you read?” interview. And every third word in Rudy Giuliani’s coverage was about how he was a liberal who once dressed in drag and slept in a gay man’s house–we knew that already, who the f- cares?

    In 2012 Michelle Bachman’s religious-based social and political views were least really far out of the mainstream when she was held to account for them. My beef with the media is that after she answered for those concerns and made it clear she wasn’t running as a cook, they kept playing up the cooky religious conservative. The media can be very selective about what they do and do not hear. Don’t get me started on Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

    Then in 2016 we had the Lyin’, the Witch, and the Robot. Were Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Hispanic enough? Was Hillary Clinton’s womanhood an obstacle to facing Trump in the debate? Was the universal dislike against her an expression of society’s misogyny?

    So I find myself rather bemused that someone who’s been in politics as long as Mr. Aravsosis is only just now learning the “fuck off” retort.

  4. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Progressive Ponder If Being Gay …

    Is it “progressives ponder” or “progressive ponders“? One or all?

    My vote is for “progressive ponders” because it seems closer to the truth.

    Buttigieg is getting quite a bit of comment in recent weeks, but I’ve read/heard very little along the lines of the Slate article. I suspect that the “sufficiently intersectional” issue is a concern only among the fringe, so “progressives ponder” would be inaccurate spin.

    But intersectionality is a bit like Abraham Lincoln’s story about the picture of George Washington in an English bathroom — nothing stirs up conservatives quite as much as the thought of intersectionality.

  5. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Mayor Pete is not going to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination, but most primary voting Democrats will not be cold, or hostile to his candidacy.

    Probably not, but I like the guy. He seems to have thoughtful policy positions on most of the issues that I care about, and he seems to have a head on his shoulders.

    It looks like others agree. Buttigieg posted good 1st Quarter fundraising numbers and he recently placed solidly in an Iowa poll of likely caucus participants.

    He has a lot of work to do if he is going to emerge as a contender, but he might pull it off and make the transition.

  6. posted by JohnInCA on

    I always find it weird when folks write long articles about how other people are wrong and immoral for not supporting the same person they themselves are not supporting.

  7. posted by Mike King & David "TJ" Bauler on

    JohninCA

    YES! Conservatives (gay or straight) are probably not going vote in the Democratic presidential primary to being with, let alone vote for Mayor Pete.

    Fred Karger ran in 2012 and is quite possibly the first openly gay man to run in a major party’s presidential primary. He had some interesting ideas and was given cold shoulder by his Republican party.

  8. posted by Kosh III on

    There they go again:
    https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/01/adoption-agencies-religion-lgbt-couples-tennessee-bill/3336880002/
    Once again the right-wing nannies want to demand that others conform to their religious opinion. So much for limited government and personal responsibility. Frak them all!

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