But that’s not progress. It’s Republican hypocrisy. Pete Buttigieg went from being mayor of South Bend, Ind., to Democratic presidential candidate to former president Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, the first out LGBTQ person to hold a Cabinet position. And from the earliest days of his administration tenure, Buttigieg was targeted with anti-LGBTQ garbage. When Buttigieg took paternity leave after a surrogate gave birth to his and his husband Chasten’s twins in 2021, Tucker Carlson said that the couple were “trying to figure out how to breastfeed.” A phony image of Buttigieg wearing a breastfeeding device quickly went viral across social media. Beyond the idiocy of excoriating any man who wants to spend time with his children, the puerile breastfeeding cracks were antigay hate. The same should be said of Vice President JD Vance’s nasty 2021 comments about the Democratic Party being run by ”childless cat ladies.” He specifically mentioned then-vice president Kamala Harris, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Buttigieg. By contrast, condemnation of Bessent from Democrats has focused on his endorsement of Trump’s absurd tariffs and giving Elon Musk, the proud billionaire owner of the president, and his gang of bros access to the federal payment system that would allow Musk to cut government spending in whatever cruelly haphazard and probably illegal way he sees fit. While Musk tries to grind the federal workforce, and perhaps the government itself, into dust, Bessent has been his willing henchman. At the same time no previous president has targeted LGBTQ people with such sweeping and destructive executive orders than Bessent’s boss. In less than a month, Trump has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in federal government; ordered recognition of only two genders; prohibited gender-affirming care for anyone under 19; and revived his ban on transgender service members in the military. In his still-early second term, Trump has spent more time disparaging the LGBTQ community, especially trans people , and threatening their rights than doing anything to fulfill his campaign promise to “immediately bring [grocery] prices down, starting on Day One.” (Egg prices, according to the Department of Agriculture, are projected to rise another 20 percent this year.) Bessent, who has a husband and two children, has said nothing about Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ rights. Nor will he. In addition to Bessent being a billionaire — Trump has the wealthiest Cabinet in American history — his other White House employment requirement is being compliant to whatever Trump wants. Even as Trump denigrates LGBTQ people, Bessent will rest easy believing his great wealth, access, and acquiescence to a tyrant will protect him and his family. And if any anti-LGBTQ Republicans have a problem with Bessent’s sexuality, they’ll say nothing publicly so long as he remains on the right side of Trump’s fickle graces. None of this is to invite into Bessent’s life the scorn the rest of us in the LGBTQ community are facing in this tumultuous moment. It’s to recognize him as a collaborator in the dangers his boss is heaping on vulnerable people. No dominant group survives without accomplices willing to work and scheme with their oppressors. It also shows how Republicans who love to otherize people because of their race, gender, or sexual or gender identity can treat with deference those they see as one of their own. They aren’t accusing Bessent of pushing his lifestyle in their faces or setting the wrong example. Within the Trump administration, he’s accepted as another force in their efforts to unravel the nation. While Trump escalates his war against LGBTQ people, Bessent gets to be a beneficiary of a battle still waged by millions — to be accepted for who he is because his private life is no one’s business but his own. As it should be for all of us.
CONTINUE READING
