While no one should have to explain their private love life to Congress, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had a pretty good response when asked how he felt about his own same-sex marriage and working with incoming House Speaker Mike Johnson. The new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives is known for his staunch opposition to anything gay.
“I will work with anybody who can help us make good transportation available to the American people,” Buttigieg told Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” Thursday night.
Johnson is way beyond mere opposition to gay marriage. In a 2003 newspaper editorial in his home state of Louisiana, Johnson called homosexuality “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle” that should be outright banned.
Johnson went on to write that states “have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.”Colbert said Johnson’s “record on LGBTQ issues is… what’s the word…. ‘awful,’” and asked Buttigieg, “How do you work with a guy who argued that same-sex relations are, quote, ‘the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic’?”
Buttigieg said he will work with Johnson on transportation issues and suggested that maybe he and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, should invite Johnson to their home to see them making dinner for their adopted twins. The children, Joseph (Gus) August and Penelope Rose, are now 3 years old.
The former Democratic presidential candidate said they have the same kind of hectic lifestyles as any parents while caring for young kids. “Everything about that is chaos, but nothing about that is dark,” he said, adding that “the love of God” is in their home and family.
