Chasten Buttigieg during a Friday appearance on CNN pushed back on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s remark that Buttigieg’s husband, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, “lied” about his sexual orientation.
Carlson began his talk show on Wednesday by discussing the recent mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., attacking a tweet posted by Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, suggesting the shooting was the latest in a “pattern” of violence against the LGBTQ community.
“Pete Buttigieg wants to talk about identity. He always wants to talk about identity,” Carlson said. “And the funny, ironic thing is … just a few years ago Buttigieg wouldn’t even admit that he was gay. He hid that and then lied about it for reasons he has never been asked to explain. Why not?”
The Transportation secretary on multiple previous occasions indicated he had not come out publicly because of his military service during the era of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which banned openly gay members from serving in the military.
“This kind of rhetoric is easy. It’s so easy to attack people and to go on your talk show and fire people up about something that’s not actually happening,” Chasten Buttigieg told anchor Don Lemon on “CNN This Morning.”
“I love my husband,” Buttigieg continued. “I know he’s a committed public servant and he has everyone’s best interests at heart. I just think these people, again with these megaphones — they have to have a big platform and rather than focusing on real issues, people’s lives, making them better, they’ve decided to focus on hate.”
Authorities say an individual entered Colorado Springs’s Club Q late Saturday night, shooting and killing five people and wounding more than a dozen others before multiple clubgoers confronted and stopped the suspect.
The suspect, whose attorneys say is nonbinary, was taken into custody on murder and hate crime charges.