Chasten Buttigieg clapped back at Mike Pence on Thursday for a joke the former vice president made at the expense of his husband, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, saying the avowed Christian isn’t “practicing what he preaches.”
According to CNN, Pence delivered the line at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington over the weekend, which is known for politicians lampooning Washington public figures.
“When Pete’s two children were born, he took two months’ maternity leave, whereupon thousands of travelers were stranded in airports, the air traffic system shut down, airplanes nearly collided in midair,” Pence reportedly said. “I mean, Pete Buttigieg is the only person in human history to have a child and all the rest of us get postpartum depression.”
Describing Pence’s remark as a “homophobic joke,” the White House demanded an apology but Chasten Buttigieg told “The View” on Thursday that the former vice president hasn’t reached out to him.
The Transportation secretary’s spouse also addressed Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, who said earlier this week that the White House “should spare America the faux outrage” and that it “would be wise to focus less on placating the woke police and focus more on bank failures, planes nearly colliding in mid-air, train derailments, and the continued supply chain crisis.”
“I think it’s not woke … to say that something is homophobic or misogynistic,” Chasten Buttigieg told “The View.” “It doesn’t make it woke, you know, it doesn’t make you a snowflake to tell someone that they’ve made a mistake.”
“I think Republican or Democrat, we can all agree that … when your kid’s connected to a ventilator, you don’t want to be anywhere but at their bedside,” he added. “I just don’t take that when it’s directed at my family, and I don’t think anybody else would, especially when you bring a very small, medically fragile child into it.”
Pence’s jab “flies in the face of what he says he is,” Buttigieg stressed.
“He says he’s a ‘family values’ Republican. … I don’t think he’s practicing what he preaches here,” he said.
The Buttigiegs became parents in 2021 after they adopted newborn twins. Pete Buttigieg came under fire after announcing that he would take two months of paternity leave to be with his infant son and daughter.