In the latest series of attempts to raise the profile of South Bend Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, Never-Trumpers and liberals have attempted to highlight his Christian faith. New York Times columnist David Brooks tried to showcase the openly gay mayor’s “conservative family values” while USA Today’s Kirsten Powers hailed his “countercultural approach to Christianity.”
Brooks’s “conservative family values” comment about Buttigieg came as part of a New York Times column entitled “Why You Love Mayor Pete.” According to Brooks: “Buttigieg is gay and personifies the progress made by the LGBTQ movement, but he doesn’t do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values. It’s just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife.”
Apparently, Brooks forgot that a married husband and wife bonded together for the purpose of child-rearing form the whole basis of “conservative family values.”
As for Powers, she focused heavily on Buttigieg’s Christianity in her column “Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s countercultural approach to Christianity is what America needs now,” which followed Powers’s interview with Buttigieg last week. Powers touted how “Buttigieg criticized right-wing Christians for ‘saying so much about what Christ said so little about, and so little about what he said so much about.’”
She also attempted to elaborate on Buttigieg’s “insightful formulation,” which she argued “applies to the religious right’s treatment of abortion as a litmus test for Christian faith, when in fact, Jesus never mentioned the issue.”
Powers continued: “That omission has not stopped many Christians from using Trump’s anti-abortion rights judicial appointments as the president’s ‘get out of jail free card,’ and license for them to support a leader who consistently behaves in a way that is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.”
Nowhere did Powers mention that Buttigieg effectively came out in favor of late-term abortion during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a process Powers herself once described as “barbaric and abhorrent.” Therefore, her own past perspective qualifies as “anti-abortion rights.”
Powers also delighted in Buttigieg’s reluctance to call President Trump a Christian, sharing a quote from the South Bend Mayor questioning how “you can be as worshipful of yourself as he is and be prepared to humble yourself before God.”
Prior to sharing that particular quote, Powers herself trashed “the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders who make a spectacle of praying publicly –in Particular over President Trump—as evidence of their holiness.”
When Buttigieg emphasized his desire to “beckon people onto the right side of history” when it comes to gay marriage, Powers “pressed him on how he could advocate showing so much grace to those who continue to perpetrate a biblical interpretation that has caused so much harm to gay people like him.”
Based on the tone of her piece, it looks like Powers agreed with Buttigieg’s description of Vice President Pence as a “social extremist, the likes of which our country has not known in national politics” and would gladly apply that characterization to everyone else on the “religious right.”
