Before we’re subsumed by Super Tuesday, let’s pause for breath and pay homage to Pete Buttigieg. In this abysmally bad hour for America, we have a rare opportunity to feel good about something.
Pete was the first openly gay presidential candidate, but what’s most important is that his sexual orientation didn’t seem to matter. When upporters were asked to list his assets, they typically talked about his eloquence. When detractors were asked about his deficiencies, they typically cited his youth and inexperience.
Pete would mention in passing that he’s “a happily married man,” and his husband would surface on the stump, but those occasions were barely blips on the national radar. And when he defended his orientation – as he did in a recent speech, calling out Mike Pence: “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator” – he did so knowing that few Americans would take offense or even care.
We shouldn’t take for granted how far we’ve come as a nation in so short a time.
Turn back the clock 16 years. One morning in February 2004, when I was the national political reporter/columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was up in Boston talking with Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh. She was spinning me about the Democrats’ bullish prospects for beating President Bush in November…when she stopped in mid-sentence to read a news bulletin on her computer. She visibly blanched. She murmured, “This just came in.”
I thought: Oh no, it must be another 9/11.
Turned out, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had decreed that gay marriage would become legal in the state that spring – just nine weeks before the Democrats were slated to hold their national convention in Boston.
No big deal, right? But remember, this was 2004. Marsh’s response was to lean forward, ever so slowly, until her forehead was resting on her desk.
Why? Because gay marriage was a toxic hot-button issue, ripe for Republican exploitation. Because poll opposition to gay marriage was at roughly 65 percent. Because the Democrats were terrified of being caricatured as decadent lefties; they had long memories of being pejoratively tagged as “San Francisco Democrats,” and we all know what behavior transpires in San Francisco.
And sure enough, when the autumn election rolled around, the Republicans came up with a clever way to gin up right-wing evangelical turnout. They put anti-gay marriage referendums on the ballot in 11 states – most notably Ohio, a swing state in the presidential election that pitted incumbent Bush against John Kerry. The GOP’s ploy worked beautifully.
The race wasn’t called until Ohio’s results were tallied, in the wee hours. Here’s what the New York Times reported: “In Ohio…political analysts credit the (anti-gay) ballot measure with increasing turnout in Republican bastions in the south and west, while also pushing swing voters in the Appalachian region of the southeast toward Mr. Bush. The president’s extra-strong showing in those areas compensated for an extraordinarily large Democratic turnout in Cleveland and in Columbus, propelling him to a 136,000-vote victory.” And the state GOP chairman said the ballot measure “helped most in what we refer to as the Bible Belt area (of Ohio), where we had the largest percentage increase in support for the president.”
Some political academics have since insisted there’s no direct proof that anti-gay prejudice swung the state to Bush and cost Kerry the election. But the point is, Republicans staged those 11 referendums precisely because they believed that hostility to gays was a political winner. And they were right. Voters said yes to all 11.
Nearly four years later, Democratic candidates still wouldn’t touch the issue. Barack Obama, new on the scene, said no to gay marriage. John Edwards (who was secretly violating his straight marriage) said that he was personally “struggling” with his views on gay marriage. Bill Richardson said being gay was a “choice” before he walked that back. Hillary Clinton tried to split hairs (naturally), insisting that marriage laws should be left to the states. And no wonder: Even two blue states, Hawaii and California, rejected gay marriage when the issue was on their ballots. Indeed, on the eve of the ’08 primaries, I wrote that the candidates “would rather swallow their tongues than say anything nice about gay marriage…As political issues go, this one is still a loser.”
But by 2012, mainstream culture, spurred by young people, was becoming so tolerant that President Obama announced his “evolution.” Spurred by Joe Biden (the veep was imprudently ahead of his boss on the issue), Obama endorsed gay marriage and the U.S. Supreme Court vetted it nationally in 2015. Pete Buttigieg got it right when he recently said that “wearing this wedding ring…couldn’t have happened two elections ago.” He’s publicly comfortable being who he is in part because a landslide 63 percent of Americans (according to Gallup) are fine with him wearing that ring.
Something he said one year ago still resonates: “Freedom means a lot to conservatives, but they have such a narrow sense of what it means. They think a lot about freedom from – freedom from government, freedom from regulation – and precious little about freedom to. Freedom to is absolutely something that has to be safeguarded by good government, just as it could be impaired by bad government.” For instance, the freedom to leave a job and start a business without losing health coverage; a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive choices “without a male politician or boss imposing their interpretation of their religion,” and the hard-won freedom to marry the person you love.
So while we’re awash these days in lies, demagoguery, and ignorance, there is still a good and tolerant America yearning to breathe free. Kudos to Pete for reminding us. Rest assured, it won’t be his last reminder.