Pete Buttigieg calls the GOP obsession with LGBTQ+ people “maddening”

Out Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg called out House Republicans’ obsession with restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ people while the American middle and working classes face more substantial problems.

“When I’m out in Wheeling, West Virginia, or Pittsburgh at the airport or anywhere else, the questions are not about beer bottles or drag queens,” Buttigieg told the National Association of Hispanic Journalists this week, referring to the months of outrage coming from conservatives about trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership with Bud Light. “The questions are about making sure that we can deliver these transportation assets that people can count on.”

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“If it is socialism, then it seems to be socialism that these Republicans love when it’s coming their way.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Buttigieg was asked about how House Republicans voted to remove funding for several community centers from a Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development funding bill earlier this week. Republicans struck out the earmarks for three LGBTQ+ community projects out of a list of over 3000 similar, non-LGBTQ+ projects receiving similar funding. They then claimed that they weren’t targeting LGBTQ+ people after Democrats called them out.

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It was the third time in the last two weeks that Republicans have attacked LGBTQ+ people in amendments to larger bills, including an air travel bill and a military funding bill. Republican primary candidates for president have made LGBTQ+ issues – and specifically attacks on transgender children’s rights – central to their campaigns and many Republican-controlled state legislatures passed legislation in the first half of the year attacking transgender kids’ rights.

“It is maddening sometimes to look at the split screen on cable TV, and I’m trying to make sure people are aware of the literally tens of thousands of good projects we’ve already supported around the country,” Buttigieg said.

“We need to do two things and it should not be hard to do,” he continued. “One is to safeguard vulnerable groups as a matter of policy, which is something we believe in as administration and is the right thing to do, and another is to keep doing the work of taking care of the basics.”