Would anyone outside Beltway politics even know what former Vice President Mike Pence said about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg if White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre hadn’t demanded an apology on Monday?
We’ll never know for sure, but it was Jean-Pierre who made headlines, not Pence, which tells you a lot in these days of the much touted “anti-wokeism” and “culture wars.”
At the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C. on March 11, Pence joked, referencing Buttigieg going on “maternity leave,” saying, “Pete is the only person in human history to have a child and everyone else gets postpartum depression.”
For the record, Buttigieg was on paternity leave as a new father of twins and one was in the neonatal intensive care unit. That’s what Pence found funny — though we’re told by the media that “not everyone laughed.”
Postpartum depression, a serious and often life-threatening illness, impacts millions of women annually. It nearly killed my own mother, as I tweeted in a comment that received 62,000 views.
Chasten Buttigieg, Pete’s husband, tweeted a photo of Pete holding their child in ICU and wrote, “An honest question for you, @Mike_Pence, after your attempted joke this weekend. If your grandchild was born prematurely and placed on a ventilator at two months old – their tiny fingers wrapped around yours as the monitors beep in the background – where would you be?”
But it was an outraged Jean-Pierre who took on Pence first, calling Pence’s “homophobic joke” at the Gridiron Club “offensive and inappropriate.”
Jean-Pierre said, “The former vice president’s homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all the more so because he treated women suffering from postpartum depression as a punchline.”
Jean-Pierre said, “He should apologize to women and LGBTQ people, who are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.”
If ever there were a moment of acute clarity that representation matters, this was it. A Black lesbian mother using her daily pulpit to call out the damaging rhetoric of a former vice-president.
If you think about it even briefly, it’s a breathtaking moment of extreme courage on Jean-Pierre’s part, particularly in the current anti-LGBTQ political climate.
The whole incident leaves us with, as they say, a lot to unpack. As Jean-Pierre explicates without giving the actual numbers, millions of Americans — women, LGBTQ people and new fathers — were attacked in this one very unfunny “joke” told by a man testing the waters for a presidential run.
What Pence said implied that fathers are irrelevant to their kids, that postpartum depression is silly, and that Buttigieg isn’t a real man with that “maternity leave” comment. Apart from the gross homophobia, Pence was stigmatizing fathers and sick mothers as malingerers.
This isn’t the first time Pence has attacked Buttigieg. As native Indianans in state politics, the two have clashed before, with Buttigieg calling out Pence on his stances on religious freedom and LGBTQ rights.
Three years ago, while talking about his long journey to coming out publicly at the LGBTQ Victory Fund Brunch, Buttigieg told Pence directly, “If you have a problem with who I am, your quarrel is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
As the first openly gay Cabinet member in U.S. history, Buttigieg has taken a lot of heat for his sexual orientation. Attacks on him from the GOP have been rampant, and on March 14, Republican House Rep. Lauren Boebert said she was presenting a resolution calling for his resignation based on his “incompetence.”
Boebert is a strident member of the extremist GOP Freedom Caucus that fought to keep Kevin McCarthy from being Speaker until he made inordinate concessions to him. But Mike Pence is testing the waters as an old-time conservative who believes that elections are final and that it’s not okay to foment an insurrection if things don’t go your way when the votes are counted.
That is a very low bar, but it also hides the facts of Pence’s long history of hating women and LGBTQ people. I covered the 2016 election for several publications and wrote about Pence and that history and his support for conversion therapy while a member of Congress where he fought for funding for the widely discredited practice.
In August 2020, HRC wrote, “Mike Pence is the Worst Vice President for LGBTQ People In Modern History,” noting, “Throughout his long career as an elected official, Mike Pence has sought to dehumanize and demean LGBTQ people at every opportunity. From his years in Congress to his time as Governor and his current role facilitating many of Trump’s anti-LGBTQ actions, Mike Pence has been a willing and eager participant in the campaign against LGBTQ equality.”
Pence has taken direct action against LGBTQ people, like opposing and voting against federal hate crimes prevention laws because it would include queer and trans people. Much of his rationale was predicated on religious freedom stances.
As governor of Indiana, Pence caused a mini-HIV outbreak when he shuttered Planned Parenthood in parts of the state. This was who Donald Trump put in charge of HIV during his administration.
Pence also was laser focused on the religious freedom issues that he and Buttigieg — a devout Christian — have sparred over. This is a key point as Pence moves forward on his current political tour where he is trying to divorce himself from the administration he was part of and party to for four years.
Pence always pushed a far-right and false narrative about what he called the dangers of LGBTQ non-discrimination protections enumerated in ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act), the precursor to the Equality Act.
Pence said in 2007, “Under ENDA, employees around the country who possess religious beliefs that are opposed to homosexual behavior would be forced, in effect, to lay down their rights and convictions at the door. For example, if an employee keeps a Bible in his or her cubicle, if an employee displays a Bible verse on their desk, that employee could be claimed by a homosexual colleague to be creating a hostile work environment because the homosexual employee objects to passages in the Bible relating to homosexuality.”
It’s in the congressional record.
Pence also did terrible things to women as governor of Indiana, including signing a law in 2016 that mandated funerals for fetuses. But that’s a topic for another time. It is unsurprising that Pence used women to attack a gay man.
What Pence said at the Gridiron dinner is egregious. It is also consistent with who he is and his personal and ideological worldview. That’s the main takeaway from this incident. What’s critical is that we not forget what he said, his lack of remorse, or how having LGBTQ people in government is crucial to our very lives.