White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is calling on former Vice-President Mike Pence to apologize for a “homophobic” joke he made about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over the weekend.
In a speech at the Gridiron dinner on Saturday, Pence said that Buttigieg, the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in the country’s history, was the first person to take “maternity” leave while everyone else got “postpartum depression”.
Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten welcomed twins in September 2021. The babies were born premature and spent weeks in the hospital after they developed a respiratory infection.
On Monday, Jean-Pierre said Pence should apologize to women and the LGBTQ community for his remarks.
“The former vice president’s homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all the more so because he treated women suffering from postpartum depression as a punchline,” she said, according to CBS. “He should apologize to women and LGBTQ people, who are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Pence’s former chief of staff,Marc Short fired back, dismissing the White House’s criticism as “faux outrage.”
“The hypocrisy is especially rich considering their own Secretary of State Antony Blinken joked that he yearned for ‘the old days’ when ‘Jews did all the work,'” Short said. “The White House 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.”
