Skip to content
Search AI Powered

Latest Stories

Pete Buttigieg Lays Out The Eye-Opening Truth About Why Republicans Act Like They Do In Powerful Video

Pete Buttigieg Lays Out The Eye-Opening Truth About Why Republicans Act Like They Do In Powerful Video
Jim Bennett/WireImage/Getty Images

*The following article contains discussion of suicide/self-harm.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been received praise for his salient insights on why the Republican Party acts the way it does and why it has recently made attacking the LGBTQ+ community and dismantling LGBTQ+ rights part of its platform.


Much of Buttigieg's criticism centered on Florida's controversial "Don't Say Gay" law.

Florida’s Republican-sponsored Parental Rights in Education bill, or H.B. 1557, was recently signed into law by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. The law, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, aims to “reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children in a specified manner.”

The law wants to prohibit “a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a specified manner” and authorizes parents to “bring an action against a school district to obtain a declaratory judgment that a school district procedure or practice violates certain provisions of law.”

Buttigieg issued his remarks during a talk at The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, where he took Republicans to task for their amplification of culture war issues over actual policymaking.

You can hear what he said in the video below.

Buttigieg said:

"There's a more superficial political pattern that I think has driven some of the politics of the behavior of people like these people in Florida. The 'Don't Say Gay Bill.'"
"And that is, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a culture war. So you got a political faction that really doesn't have an answer for many of the questions that people are wrestling with."
"They love talking about gas prices but they don't have an answer on gas prices. Never have an answer on inflation. Many of them responded to our call for bipartisan infrastructure work with a 'no.'"
"[We] haven't seen answer on what to do about the price of prescription drugs. They voted against lowering that."
"Don't have answer on what to do about the cost of child care. Don't have a great answer on taxes. Actually want to raise taxes for the poor."
"That's a new one. I thought I'd seen it all, then I saw Senator [Tim] Scott's proposal to raise taxes on the poor."

Buttigieg noted that all of these issues with Republican policymaking–or lackthereof–are "not great territory for them to be debating on."

What they do instead, he said, is "find somebody vulnerable and pick on them, which at the moment is largely the trans community."

He added:

"They find something to talk about which can go between the laughable–'Is Donald Duck going to make your kid gay?'–to the incredibly dark, which is the suggestion that the very presence of someone who is gender non-conforming or trans or gay or lesbian or otherwise different, the very existence of somebody like that is very much an adult subject, right?"
"That is my kids, let's say in a first grade classroom were to mention in passing over the weekend that they had a great time going with their dads to the zoo, that they would have somehow by saying that uttered something age inappropriate, and get us really fired up about that fight."

Many have praised Buttigieg for his observations and offered further criticisms of Republicans for pushing discriminatory legislation.



Buttigieg has criticized the "Don't Say Gay" legislation on other occasions.

He has been emphatic in his belief that the bill is "dangerous legislation" that could result in more suicides among LGBTQ+ kids, noting that it "tells youth who are different or whose families are different that there’s something wrong with them out of the gate."

Buttigieg has said that Republicans are not in fact as "pro-family" as their party members like to claim because it should not be inappropriate at any age "to talk about a kid’s mom and mom or dad and dad or whatever family structure we live with."

Buttigieg's husband, educator and activist Chasten Buttigieg, has also been critical of the legislation, pointing out that that LGBTQ+ people and their families have often been used as scapegoats throughout history and that the legislation would "push LGBTQ families away and into the closet."

Adding that the bill would "kill kids," he went on to cite statistics from The Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth, that noted that suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 24 and that 42 percent of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.

---

LGBTQ+ Youth can get help through:

More from News/lgbtq

Signal app logo; J.D. Vance
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Signal's Founder Epically Roasts Vance Over The Disastrous Group Chat Debacle

Signal founder Matthew Rosenfeld, better known by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, mocked Vice President J.D. Vance after the app found itself at the center of the Trump administration's group text scandal.

Rosenfeld's post came amid revelations that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was invited into a Signal chat with high-level Trump administration officials, particularly Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, discussing military strategy surrounding war strikes in Yemen.

Keep ReadingShow less
MTG, Martha Kelner
C-SPAN

MTG Blasted For Her Unhinged Reaction To A UK Reporter Asking Her A Question

Far right Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was bashed for viciously shutting down a British reporter who had a question about the Signal group chat scandal, AKA "Signalgate."

Republican President Donald Trump's administration continues to downplay concerns after The Atlantic'seditor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to the Signal messaging app's group chat in which U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared with top intelligence officials the specific weapons programs regarding the U.S. war strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Keep ReadingShow less
Screenshot of Rachel Maddow
MSNBC

Rachel Maddow Gives Trump A Blistering Reality Check After His 'Perfect' Presidency Claims

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow criticized President Donald Trump after he claimed "we've had two perfect months" to start out his presidency—conveniently downplaying "Signalgate" and ignoring all the scandals that have thus far struck his administration.

You can see his comments to reporters in the video below:

Keep ReadingShow less
train crossing in small town
craig kerwien on Unsplash

People Share Their Most Embarrassing Small Town Stories

I lived most of my life in a very small town in Northern Maine. There were about 200 kids in my high school and there were 56 kids in my graduating class—we were tied with the class of 1961 for the largest class ever.

When the primary employer in town—Pinkham Lumber Mill—shut down, the town got even smaller. Now the senior class is considered large if it reaches double digits.

Keep ReadingShow less
A post-it with "I Quit" written on it over a computer keypad
a yellow notepad on a keyboard
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

People Reveal Why They Quit Their Job On The First Day

As much as anyone may want to quit a job, at the end of the day it's easier said than done.

For one thing, even if people are working soul-sucking jobs that barely cover expenses, they still can't afford to lose the paycheck, until something better comes along.

Keep ReadingShow less