CommentsLGBTQ - Out Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was asked about how the majority of House Republicans opposed last week’s Respect for Marriage Act (RMA) bill and about Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) claim that the bill was a “stupid waste of time.”
“If [Rubio’s] got time to fight against Disney, I don’t know why he wouldn’t have time to help safeguard marriages like mine. Look, this is really, really important to a lot of people. It’s certainly important to me,” Buttigieg said on CNN’s State of the Union this weekend.
Buttigieg was referring to how Rubio attacked Disney in April for issuing a statement opposing Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
Buttigieg went on to talk about his weekend, saying that he “tried to give [his husband] Chasten a little bit of a break” by feeding their twin babies at breakfast
“That’s no small thing, as every parent of small kids knows,” he joked, adding that it wasn’t particularly easy that morning.
“That half-hour of my morning had me thinking about how much I depend on and count on my spouse every day, and our marriage deserves to be treated equally,” he said. “I don’t’ know why this would be hard,” he added, referring to the RMA vote.
“I just don’t understand how such a majority of House Republicans voted ‘no’ on our marriage as recently as Tuesday,” he continued, “hours after I was in a room with a lot of them talking about transportation policy, having what I thought were perfectly normal conversations with many of them on that subject, only for them to go around the corner and say that my marriage doesn’t deserve to continue.”
“If they don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, they can vote ‘yes,’ and move on, and that would be really reassuring for a lot of families around America, including mine,” he concluded.
The RMA would overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and require the federal government and all states to respect same-sex marriages performed by any state that allows them, if the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.
(Alex Bollinger has been working in LGBTQ media for over a decade and has a Masters degree from the Paris School of Economics. He lives in Paris with his partner. Follow @alexpbollinger on Twitter. This article was featured in LGBTQ Nation.)
