Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s “victim card” waving has now sparked the ire of his own brother-in-law, who claims he exploited his husband’s family’s painful history to score intersectionality political points.
Recently, the Washington Post published a glowing profile on the South Bend, Indiana, mayor in which his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, was characterized as coming from a homophobic family crippled by poverty. According to Chasten, when he came out as gay to his family shortly after graduating high school, he packed his bags and left home due to the lack of acceptance. From the article:
When Chasten came out the summer after graduation, some of his friends told him they loved him and that it didn’t matter. Others said they loved him and that it did matter. He remembers one friend invoking God and urging him to change his mind — “Like it was a choice,” he says, “this thing I had decided to do.”
Chasten told his family last. Scared he wouldn’t keep his nerve to say the words out loud, he sat his parents down in the living room and passed them a letter. “I remember my mom crying,” he says, “and the first thing she asked me was if I was sick. I think she meant, like, did I have AIDS?”
A stalemate took hold of the house. There was a lot of silence, Chasten says, but he remembers hearing one of his brothers utter, “No brother of mine …”
Chasten packed his bags. “I felt like I just could not be there,” he says. “So, I left.”
Speaking with the Washington Examiner, Chasten’s brother, Rhyan Glezman, a Christian pastor in Michigan, said the story was dramatically embellished to further widen Pete Buttigieg’s platform.
“A mayor from a small city and his husband, a child who grew up with nothing and his parents kicked him out … it makes a perfect political story for the campaign,” Glezman told the outlet. “To me that’s very sad. If that’s all you have to stand on, you’re not fit to be president of the United States.”
The Washington Post also cited Glezman’s opposition to gay marriage as a way to paint him as a bigot who does not love his brother.
“Do I love him? Absolutely. He is my brother.” Glezman told the Washington Examiner. “You can’t change that. Just because we have a disagreement doesn’t change that.”
Glezman added that Chasten’s family was not particularly shocked he came out as gay and that they were not actually all that religious, certainly not to the point of banishing their own flesh and blood into homelessness. He even claims the family only attended church on Christmas and Easter.
“He went away,” Glezman said. “He was struggling for a time. But there was nothing on the family end that said he had to leave.”
As to the Washington Post characterizing Chasten’s home life as one of poverty, Glezman said that’s just not true. “The story makes it look as if he came from nothing, a poor family,” he said. “Chasten had everything, from cellphones paid for, car insurance paid for.”
Since those days, Glezman said he and his brother have actually developed a nice bond, having hosted previous boyfriends at his home in the past. Last year, he even attended a baseball game with Chasten and Pete Buttigieg.
