Why Pete Buttigieg could lead the LGBT Community back to Sanity

Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is the first openly gay presidential candidate to have achieved a high profile, and he has been warmly embraced by many people in the LGBT community. Of course, Mayor Pete's support isn't limited to the LGBT community, but there has been particular interest about his run in the LGBT community.

So why do I think that Mayor Pete is a good role model? Because he's reasonable, and he deals in good faith with all sides. His recent comments about Chick-Fil-A demonstrate this. While he doesn't agree with the politics of Chick-Fil-A, he also thinks that all the talk about boycotting Chick-Fil-A is perhaps a little too much virtue signalling and a litte too 'santimonious'. Instead, he has suggested that perhaps a bridge should be built here.

In recent years, we have seen a decline in rationality and civility in some parts of the LGBT community, which saddens me a lot. It looks like the activists who are supposed to represent us have decided to just abandon the successful methods of recent years, and go back to using the methods of the 1960s and 70s, which alienated so many people that we had to wait until 2003 for being gay to be legal across the Western world. The 1960s and 70s were a mistake, and it caused the prolonging of homophobia for three more decades, with even relatively young people today still suffering the consequences. On the other hand, if you look at how the marriage equality movement was able to win over hearts and minds everywhere in such a short time, you can see that they didn't do so by being angry and militant. Quite the opposite. So, in my view, the LGBT community needs to make a choice, to embrace the methods that got us marriage equality, or to needlessly re-learn the lessons of the 20th century.

This is where the emergence of Pete Buttigieg as a major figure in the LGBT landscape could be important. In my opinion, the recent activist tilt back to radicalism is driven more by a change in the balance of power between the factions than anything else, but some young LGBT people feel like they have no choice but to go whichever way the activists go. With the emergence of Pete Buttigieg, we have a clearer choice between the two paths. Mayor Pete's meteoric rise in popualarity shows that the path that brought us to marriage equality is still a very viable option in this day and age, and we can collectively decide to travel down this path if we want to. I don't know how far Mayor Pete's campaign will go, but just by being a candidate with a high profile, it is possible that he may change the course of the LGBT community going forward. And for that, future generations may have to thank him.