Chasten Buttigieg says Mike Pence is not practicing what he preaches, calling out the former Trump vice president’s hypocrisy of portraying himself as a man of “family values” while attacking his husband, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and their infant twins – and he says he’s not waiting around for an apology.
Last weekend Pence gave a speech at the closed door Gridiron Club Dinner, saying the Secretary of Transportation had taken “maternity leave” but it was America who got “postpartum depression.” Pence has been highly criticized for both the homophobia and misogyny of his remarks.
“The thing about what he said is, it flies in the face of what he says he is. He says he’s a family values Republican,” Buttigieg said on ABC’s “The View” Thursday (video below.)
“So I don’t think he’s practicing what he preaches,” Buttigieg continued. “But it’s part of a much bigger trend: attacking families. And it wasn’t just about attacking the LGBTQ community, because someone wrote this [joke] and he checked it and purposely said, ‘maternity leave’ rather than ‘paternity leave,’ but also, it’s a bigger conversation about the work that women do in families, right? Taking a swipe at all women in all families, and expecting that women would stay at home and raise children I think is a pretty misogynistic view, especially from a man who just last year said that we should be supporting more people who adopt.”
RELATED: Chasten Buttigieg Accuses Mike Pence of Using Couple’s Twins as a ‘Punchline’ in Homophobic Attack
Earlier in the segment, asked if the former vice president has been in touch to apologize, Buttigieg said, “no,” and added, “I think it’s not ‘woke,’ you know, to say that something is homophobic or misogynistic. It doesn’t make it ‘woke,’ it doesn’t make you a snowflake to tell someone that they’ve made a mistake.”
“And you know, I spoke up for two reasons. One, I’m always going to stick up for my family, especially my kid,” he continued, to applause from the audience. “I know we all struggle to find a balance between work and family life and I’ve never seen someone work harder than my husband to find that balance. But I think Republican or Democrat, we can all agree that when your child, our prematurely born child, barely five pounds, when your kid is connected to a ventilator, you don’t want to be anywhere but at their bedside. So watching Gus in the hospital, for anyone who has ever experienced having a child in the ICU, when their the tiny little hand is gripping around your finger.”
“You know, I would watch Pete have to peel Gus’ fingers back and duck into the little bathroom in his room so he could do a Zoom with a virtual background so nobody would see that he’s in the hospital.”
“The other reason I spoke up is because, like I mentioned, we all have an obligation to hold people accountable for when they say something wrong, especially when it’s misogynistic, especially when it’s homophobic. And I just don’t take that when it when it’s directed at my family, and I don’t think anybody else would, especially when you bring a very small medically fragile child into it.”
Watch below or at this link.