LGBT activists were dismayed Sunday evening when “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg announced the suspension of his campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency, but many Democrats—and others—are probably breathing a sigh of relief.
The end of Buttigieg’s campaign may have been a foregone conclusion even before he got trounced in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. According to the forecast by the election-watching website fivethirtyeight.com, Buttigieg had less than a 1% likelihood of ever capturing the needed number of delegates to clinch the nomination. Saturday’s defeat simply cemented those odds against him.
But some may wonder at the trajectory Buttigieg’s campaign took: from media darling and wunderkind of the left to shrugging defeat. Some analysts point chiefly to the candidate’s inability to garner the needed support of African-American voters, on which any Democratic hopeful’s campaign must rest. But this view misses the elephant in the room: Buttigieg’s sexuality.
The mainstream media and pundits won’t want to look at this matter too closely, of course. In the wake of the Obergefell Supreme Court decision that made same-sex “marriage” a nationwide reality, the consistent narrative of the liberal elite has been to pretend that this really was a result of a shift in popular attitudes, rather than a capricious ideology imposed on the nation by five non-elected judges.
The fact of the matter is that many Americans still believe that marriage is solely the union of a man and a woman, and would be very upset by the example set by Buttigieg and his “husband” as America’s First Family. A ballroom in San Francisco may have erupted in cheers when Buttigieg was introduced by his partner on stage and asked the crowd, “Do I have a great husband or what?”, but many people from elsewhere in America—and around the world—were likely not as enthusiastic.
Therefore, though it is unlikely we will see any polling or data asking this obvious question, because the media and Democratic establishment fear what the answer might be, we might at least ponder the matter ourselves: does Sunday night demonstrate that America simply isn’t ready to put a gay man in a same-sex “marriage” in the White House?