Free Republic

Former President Jimmy Carter said Friday he believes Donald Trump would have lost the 2016 election without Russian help. “There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated, would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” said Carter. “He lost the election and he was put in office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Carter was speaking in Leesburg, Va. at a panel discussion on human rights hosted by the Carter Center. Carter was then asked by moderator Jon Meacham, a historian,...

Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 33 has a sculpture of two 20-foot wrenches emerging from the mud out by its pocked parking lot in Des Moines, Iowa. Inside, a public bathroom features a shower adorned with gone-gray towels and multiple containers of industrial-strength body wash, presumably for cleaning up after some kind of toxic toilet encounter. It is all very manly. *** The crowd goes wild! OK, maybe NPR singles-night wild. Still, there is light in their eyes as they contemplate replacing our porn-star-banging, syntax-mangling president with a 37-year-old gay Rhodes scholar/Afghanistan veteran who likes to install Wi-Fi sensors in...

Sorry for another LGBT rights post today, but someone just sent this very important Washington Post essay to me, and hey, I’ve got to do my part for Pride Month. Let’s back up a bit, all the way back to 2004 and thereabouts. Back then, people who couldn’t understand why people like me opposed same-sex marriage were in the habit of asking, “What does my gay neighbors’ marriage have to do with me?” People like me would patiently explain the legal consequences of gay marriage across any number of areas, and also explain the lines that would have to be...

Pete and Chasten Buttigieg celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Sunday. You know this if you’re among Pete’s roughly 1.1 million Twitter followers or Chasten’s 340,000, because they traded sweetly effusive missives, as they frequently do. Pete gushed: “One year ago I married the love of my life. I’m so thankful I found you, Chasten, and can’t wait to spend the rest of our life together.” Chasten posted pictures of the two of them with their arms around each other, which he introduced by writing that he was on his way “to find this cute guy on the trail. Can’t...

Chasten Buttigieg, husband to South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), said he's proud of the progress that has been made in the gay rights movement leading to his husband's presidential candidacy, but warned that there is still a long way to go "for equality." "The fight for equality is far from over," Buttigieg said Monday at a Democratic National Convention gala for LGBTQ rights in New York. "I wish I could stand here and tell you that all of the responses to my husband running for president have either been positive or that the criticisms have simply been about...

The Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg wants to start a family with his husband, Chasten, and says that could happen if he makes it to the White House. “I don’t see why not,” the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in a Father’s Day television interview that also marked his first wedding anniversary. Buttigieg was little known nationally before he began his campaign for president earlier this year, but has seen his star rise in recent months, ranking alongside Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in one Iowa poll last week. *** Buttigieg told CNN’s State of the Union that “it...

Where I fell on the sexuality spectrum would take me the better part of two years to figure out. A part of myself wasn't living. And by not letting that part live, I was slowly dying. There's a price of admission for coming out as gay later in life. Over the course of several months, I paid the price daily. It was like I was watching a movie about myself but unable to control what was unfolding. Everything fell apart. I did my best to slowly confide in my husband. But I kept many of my feelings inside to avoid...

ATLANTA - In 2018, Stacey Abrams was the first Georgia gubernatorial nominee to march the Atlanta Pride Parade. In 2019, she will be the grand marshal of the event. The Democrat released a video Friday thanking the LGBTQ community for the honor – and took a shot at Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for supporting a “religious liberty” measure. “We have an administration that is making life difficult for families wishing to adopt and patriots wishing to serve,” she said. “And we have a man in Georgia governor’s mansion who still wants to sign discrimination into law. *** Her focus on...

During an interview in Washington on Thursday, The Post’s Robert Costa tried his best to get Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg to say something negative about fellow candidate Joe Biden. Part of the old guard? Defended credit card companies? Responsible for mass incarceration as a result of the 1994 crime bill? But each time, Buttigieg calmly sidestepped the invitation to go after the former vice president, while using the opportunity to lay out policy differences (“I have a difference of opinion with anybody who favors credit card companies over consumers”), and demonstrating his wonkish knowledge....

The 29-year-old political spouse said there was a lot of judgement when he came out as gay to his family, claiming to remember one of his brothers uttering, “No brother of mine …” during the conversation with his mom and dad, both of whom are nominally Catholic and were, according to Rhyan, very accepting of Chasten’s orientation. “That was a long time ago, but that’s not what I would say. That’s not my character, that’s not my brother’s character,” Rhyan said. “Nobody ever rejected him at all. … I would say they embraced him even deeper.” Chasten also told the...

In his so-called “maiden speech,” delivered on the floor of the Senate on May 15, Hawley spoke with the coiled energy of a reformer, the intense passion of a muckraker, and the Trumanesque bluntness of a Show-Me Stater. In his address, he offered no defense of the status quo and nary a word about his fellow Republicans—no ode to President Donald Trump nor paean to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He didn’t insult them; he simply didn’t mention them. Instead, Hawley used his quick 14 minutes to strike a stark tone on other topics. He used the word “despair”—as in...

It’s hard to conceive of just how monumental Milk’s 1977 election was in 2019 terms. Openly LGBT individuals have now held some form of elected office in all 50 states, the last midterm election brought a “a rainbow wave” of advancements, and Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, is in the field of contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination. But the late 1970s were a time of radical gay activism and conservative crusades. This was the age of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign and the Briggs Initiative, a California ballot measure that would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching...

“So whatever we do now will decide not just what the next four years looks like, but what like but the next 40 years will look like,” Buttigieg told more than 500 people at the Wildwood Smokehouse & Saloon. “That’s why we’ve just not got to win an election, but win the era for our values.” Republicans have made claims on those values and Buttigieg is reclaiming them, said Sarah Prineas, who introduced him. Buttigieg “doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the giant, orange elephant in the room,” she said. “He is a uniter. He makes us feel...

When Buttigieg . . . broke through as a candidate during a CNN town hall in March, he . . . questioned the merits of the fixation among religious conservatives with sexuality in paragraph-length answers that his friends from his Harvard years recognized immediately as quintessential, undergraduate Pete. *** Whether he’s arguing that Democrats should take back God, morality, and freedom from Republicans or that liberals too often play on conservatives’ political turf instead of articulating their own vision and values, Buttigieg’s rhetoric as a candidate sounds nearly identical to his political musings when he was at Harvard, according to...

CHICAGO — Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg on Friday accused Vice President Mike Pence of advancing “homophobic policies,” saying that while he doesn’t know whether Pence is truly homophobic, his policies are “hurting other people” just the same. “I don’t know what’s in his heart,” Buttigieg told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview airing Friday. But, he added, “if you’re in public office and you advance homophobic policies, on some level it doesn’t matter whether you do that out of political calculation or whether you do it out of sincere belief.” “The problem is, it’s hurting other people,”...

SAMPLE ITEM: 4. Sherri Glezman Left a Note for Pete Buttigieg On Their Wedding Day Reminding Him That Chasten Would Always Be Her BabyChasten Glezman Buttigieg appears to have a close relationship with his mother. Sherri Glezman was the one to pick up the phone and urge him to come back home a few months after he had revealed that he was gay (more on that below). On Pete and Chasten’s wedding day, Sherri left a note for Pete in his room. He shared in his autobiography that the note read in part, “Take care of my baby, he may...

By now, most of us in the Philly area following the dialogue around reproductive justice — abortion access specifically — have probably read about the most recent “incident” downtown. State Rep. Brian Sims recorded a video of himself speaking to protesters outside a Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania on Holy Thursday, recorded another video in early May, and later took to Twitter. *** [S]omething Sims said particularly sparked my interest both as an abortion doula — someone who supports pregnant people before, during, and after the decision and process to terminate a pregnancy — and as a candidate for ordination...

After the Alabama Senate passed a bill that makes most abortions in the state at any point during pregnancy illegal, Democrat 2020 hopeful Pete Buttigieg took to Twitter to share his thoughts. “The Alabama legislature is ignoring science, criminalizing abortion, and punishing women,” Buttigieg said in the tweet, which linked to a New York Times article that explained the bill. “Instead, the government’s role should be to make sure all women have access to comprehensive affordable care, and that includes safe and legal abortion.” *** Wednesday evening, Buttigieg also shared a tweet from the Yellowhammer Fund account, which claimed: “#Abortion...

South Bend mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg demonstrated once again that he marches to a rather warped brand of Christian theology. As the Hollywood elite joins hand-in-hand to boycott the state of Georgia for passing a fetal heartbeat bill that bans abortions once doctors can detect a baby's heartbeat in the mother's womb, the South Bend mayor has denounced the newly-acted law as a "cruel attack" on women. According to LifeNews, Buttigieg denounced the law in a tweet last week shortly after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill. "A woman has enough to deal with when it...

The South Bend, Ind., mayor also spoke of the need to overcome divisions during a swing stop at a gala for an LGBTQ civil rights group. He said that LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, people of color and with disabilities and workers are experiencing a “crisis of belonging in this country.” "What every gay person has in common with every excluded person of any kind is knowing what it's like to see a wall between you and the rest of the world and wonder what it's like on the other side," Buttigieg said during his keynote address for the Human Rights...