Mike Johnson and Pete Buttigieg's Fight About Families

Don't let bigots decide what a family is.

Mike Johnson, an architect of TFG's Big Lie and an evil-vizier type of committed monster that we haven't experienced since Stephen Miller or Kirstjen Nielsen, was elected Speaker of the House by the circus-in-flames we refer to as the House of Representatives. Many people pointed to his low profile as a possible reason for how an election-denier who believes in torturing queer people until they're straight was voted in by so-called "reasonable" Republicans, but that is maybe the least surprising thing that party has done lately. The "moderates" of the Republican party have a habit of putting on a show of hand-wringing about the "tyranny of the minority" inflicted by their most extreme wing and voting for the most extreme wing anyway. One wishes they were all half-talented at pantomime because then, at least, it wouldn't feel like an insult to our intelligence. Conveniently, it is only after he's been sworn in that Johnson's past is investigated, and what was found was abhorrent, if not surprising.

Yes, Johnson is a bigot who believes in conversion therapy and that "homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic." Are conservatives aware that when they speak about us queers in these operatic, fantastical terms they shoot the moon and end up praising us? Did the PRIDE/DEMON thing teach them anything? I know that when my partner and I engage in ungodly acts of gayness in our home (hate-watching Gilded Age, talking about how hard Carla Gugino served on Fall of the House of Usher, listening to Mitski, etc) I'm thinking of how much doom I'm raining down upon our otherwise spotless utopic meritocracy. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in which he was asked about Johnson's ridiculous fears that someone being gay somewhere will destroy America. His response was an interesting one:

"If he could see what it's like when I come home from work, and Chas is bringing the kids home from daycare or vice versa, and one of us is getting the Mac and Cheese ready and the other's microwaving those freezer meatballs, which are a great cheat code if you've got a toddler and you need to feed them quickly, and one won't take their shoes off and one needs a diaper change." He then added, "Everything about that is chaos, but nothing about this is dark."

To be clear, families, queer and otherwise, can and will take many different shapes. The vision of a domestic normalcy that transcends differences in sexuality and gender is a tempting one. I can see the reasoning there, that if queer people can show themselves to live up to traditional ideas of family values, greater acceptance could be achieved. I can see how attempting to relate human-to-human could work in this case, as if to say, "Don't be alarmed, my family is like yours." Republican zealots like Johnson likely have a nightmarish idea of what a queer family is and emphasizing the human similarities between Buttigieg's family and Johnson's could lead to some greater understanding. Where this loses me comes down to two assumptions that I see in this exchange: that queer people should embrace heteronormativity to be accepted and that anti-queer bigots can be convinced to love queer people.

Heteronormativity, for any that don't know, refers to the collection of expectations that follow in having a "normal relationship" that is invariably modeled on a heterosexual relationship. Gender roles are adhered to with a femme partner expected to be nurturing and domestic and a masculine partner as the breadwinner and ultimate leader of the family. These restrictively defined gender roles, and all the gender essentialism that comes with it is directly antithetical to queerness, which necessarily challenges those assumptions. Using heteronormativity to show ignorant bigots that we can do relationships just like they can is a fool's errand and amounts to little more than appeasement. Simply put, we shouldn't have to be similar to be worthy of respect. Assimilating to a regressive way of thinking to placate bigots gains queer people very little aside from highly conditional acceptance. It's like a leonine contract in that queer people are accepted only if they submit to the superiority of heteronormativity.

This leads me to the second assumption, that with enough good behavior from queers, proud morons like Johnson could come to see the humanity in the LGBTQ+ community. To this, I can only say that chasing the approval of someone who believes you're innately wrong and deviant will not end well. Johnson and his ilk do not care if someone is the most penitent queer person on Earth; that someone is queer is an issue itself. There is no taking that seriously in the sense that it cannot be reasoned with. They will move the goalposts, they will change the shape of their expectations, and rearrange the words of their arguments. The goal is not to have queer people arrange their relationships in ways acceptable to heterosexuals; the goal is to not have queer people at all. Continuing to play this game, continuing to meet their dog-whistle "family values" concerns, only legitimizes their bullshit.

There is value in showing that despite what they believe, we are humans with many of the same day-to-day problems, and I understand that's the intention of Buttigeig's response. However, instead of kowtowing to standards held forth by bigots, we should be challenging those standards fundamentally. We are as different as we are similar and instead of legitimizing Republican ideas about how a family should be by showing how closely we adhere to their standards, we should be challenging the notion that our differences make queer people less respectable. Even if Buttigieg and his family were radically different from the standard nuclear ideal, it wouldn't mean they'd be worthy of less respect. By proving what wholesome families by Republican standards we queers make, we can easily cede control over what a wholesome family can be in America.