“Does he have a same-sex partner?”: An Iowa voter asked to change her vote for Pete Buttigieg after learning that the Democratic candidate was gay, in a courteous but tense exchange posted on Twitter on Tuesday.
According to American media, the scene took place Monday evening in Cresco, a rural town in the north of this Midwestern state which launched the primary season.
The sequence, of just over two minutes, was shared on Tuesday by a local Democratic Party official, Laura Hubka.
“Are you telling me he has a partner of the same sex? Pete?” Asked the voter at the start of this exchange with a representative of the candidate.
“Yes, he is married,” replies the young woman.
“So I don’t want anyone like that in the White House,” said the lady, asking that she be returned her bulletin.
Obviously embarrassed, the campaign representative for Buttigieg said that the former mayor of South Bend (Indiana) “is a human being, like you and me, and that shouldn’t be important.”
“How come we didn’t say anything before,” asks the voter, who claims “never to have known” the sexual orientation of the moderate candidate, who nevertheless has never hidden his homosexuality since the start of the campaign .
A tense conversation about the Bible follows.
“Why is it in the Bible that a man should marry a woman,” said the voter, who wears a support sticker for Amy Klobuchar, another moderate candidate.
“I totally respect your point of view,” says the representative with a smile. “I think we have differences in interpretation,” she says, keeping her calm when the voter accuses her of not being a believer.
It is not known if the voter finally resumed her ballot.
In a speech in which he celebrated “his staggering victory” in Iowa, the state where he won the Democratic primary according to partial results released on Tuesday, the 38-year-old former mayor appeared to be referring to his sexual orientation and personal history.
This result “proves that, for a child somewhere who wonders if he or she or ‘iel’ has a place among his own family, if you believe in yourself or in your country, then your belief will find reinforced “, he declared, using in English the neutral pronoun” they “, which can be translated in French by” iel “, contraction of” il “and” elle “.
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