U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg responded to homophobic remarks Mike Johnson once made about same-sex marriage by inviting the Republican Speaker of the House to his home to meet his husband Chasten and the couple’s toddler twins.
While working for the Alliance Defense Fund, now renamed the Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson penned a 2004 op-ed resurfaced by CNN’s KFile. It calls what would become the national conversation on same-sex marriage, “a cataclysmic battle that will soon decide whether the sacred institutions of marriage and the traditional family are ultimately preserved or discarded by our increasingly secularized society.”
“Experts project” Johnson also claimed in that op-ed, “that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”
Eleven years later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled same-sex couples have the same constitutional rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples. It is now more than two decades after Johnson’s claim, with no indication the unnamed experts he referred to were correct.
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“Countless studies prove that traditional marriage is unquestionably the best, healthiest, and most satisfying relationship for everyone,” Johnson also claimed in that op-ed. “Children in stable, traditional, two-parent homes have less physical and emotional problems, do better in school, and are less likely to live in poverty, get into trouble, or be the victims of physical or sexual abuse.”
In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and Johnson’s claim did not even refer to children being raised by same-sex parents. But since that time, at least 75 (as of 2015) studies have proven that children raised by same-sex parents do at least as well as children raised by different-sex parents.
Thursday night, Stephen Colbert asked Secretary Buttigieg about Speaker Johnson’s remarks on CBS’s “The Late Show.”
“When we last talked, Mike Johnson was not Speaker of the House,” Colbert began. “Now, Mike Johnson is Speaker of the House. His record on LGBTQ issues is, what’s the word? Awful. So, how do you work with a guy who argued that same-sex relations are ‘the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest Republic?'”
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After a brief pause, Secretary Buttigieg replied, “Look, I’ll work with anybody who can help us get good transportation available to the American people, but I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just have him over, ’cause our little house is not far from the Capitol.”
“And if you can see what it’s like when I come home from work, Chasten’s bringing the kids home from daycare or vice-versa, and one of us is getting the kids ready. And the other one’s microwaving those little freezer meatballs that are a great cheat code if you’ve got toddlers and you’ve got to feed them quickly and they won’t take their shoes off and one of them needs a diaper change.”
“Everything about that is chaos, but nothing about that is dark. That’s, the love of God is in that House.”
Watch below or at this link.
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