South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg says he’s certain that one or more of the previous 44 presidents before Trump, was, like Buttigieg, a gay man.
Speaking with Mike Allen of Axios in an interview broadcast on HBO, Buttigieg also admitted that he was depressed for a year after his seven-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2014. He also said he wouldn’t move the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, where President Trump put it in May, 2018.
One problem: Buttigieg offered no evidence that a previous president had been a homosexual.
“Gaydar” Not That Good
If Buttigieg is right, he would not then become the “first gay president,” as some have said. Buttigieg isn’t right, but in any event Allen asked the question this way:
Republicans claimed that John Kerry was a traitor in Vietnam. That Barack Obama was a Muslim. If you were to win the nomination, they’ll say you’re too young, too liberal, too gay to be commander-in-chief. You are young. You are a liberal. You are gay. How will you respond?”
Answer Buttigieg:
I’ll respond by explaining where I want to lead this country. People will elect the person who will make the best president. And we have had excellent presidents who have been young. We have had excellent presidents who have been liberal. I would imagine we’ve probably had excellent presidents who were gay — we just didn’t know which ones.
“You believe that we’ve had a gay commander-in-chief?” Allen asked.
Replied Buttigieg, “I mean, statistically, it’s almost certain.”
Allen then pressed him: “In your reading of history, do you believe you know who they were?”
“My gaydar even doesn’t work that well in the present, let alone retroactively,” Buttigeig admitted. “But one can only assume that’s the case.”
Gay President?
Whatever the working order of Buttigieg’s gaydar, it would have been helpful if Allen had pressed on what “statistics” he was citing; i.e., why it’s “almost certain” that one of the 44 presidents before Trump was “gay.”
Most likely, Buttigieg was referring to the false claim that 10 percent of men are homosexuals, a bogus statistic from science fraudster Alfred Kinsey, the gall-wasp expert and pervert who was partial to jamming toothbrushes into his urethra. Kinsey’s data, which appeared in his equally bogus study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, came from questions he asked prison inmates and male prostitutes.
Anyway, if Buttigieg used the Kinsey figure, it would mean at least four presidents were homosexuals.
Using the real figure, less than four percent, would mean just one president was homosexual, which is still just a guess, and an evidence-free guess at that.
In fact, we can’t really assume anything. Although some say James Buchanan was most a homosexual based upon his close friendship with Senator William Rufus King of Alabama, whom Andrew Jackson called “Miss Nancy,” the evidence is, as one writer put it, circumstantial and proves nothing. Buchanan, he wrote, was not a homosexual.
In other words, Buttigieg tossed out the claim with no evidence and hoped his audience would concede that electing a homosexual to the presidency was nothing much to worry about.
Depression
But it is something to worry about, given Buttigieg’s admission that he suffered depression after his return from Afghanistan, which is when he publicly declared his sexual proclivities.
Buttigieg, an intelligence analyst on a military base, said his depression resulted from his return to normal civilian life and the “effect of having been exposed to danger from serving.” Buttigieg frankly admitted that he wasn’t “kicking down doors” as a special forces operator would, but “any time, in any way, you are even remotely involved in killing, it takes something out of you, and it takes a lot of work to process that.”
Buttigieg’s struggle with depression is hardly a surprise given the significantly higher rate of mental illness among homosexuals compared to normal people. As a writer for the leftist Guardian put it, “mental illness and being queer go hand in hand.”
Not that it matters anyway.
Buttigieg’s chances of even getting the Democratic nomination are next to zero. Still, if by some miracle Buttigieg prevails, the first “gay” president might just get his face on a $3 bill.
Photo: AP Images
