...the testicleless mayor of South Bend, Indiana, since 2012. Buttigieg graduated from Harvard College and, on a Rhodes Scholarship, from Pembroke College, Oxford. From 2007 to 2010, he worked at McKinsey and Company, a consulting firm. From 2009 to 2017 Buttigieg served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant and deploying to Afghanistan in 2014. Buttigieg was first elected mayor of South Bend in 2011 and was reelected in 2015. During his second term, he announced he was gay. Buttigieg also campaigned for Indiana state treasurer in 2010 and for chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2017, losing both elections. He is running for the Dem nomination in 2020 on the theory that being mayor of a nondescript medium sized city is qualification to run the country...addressed a 9-year-old boy during his Saturday rally, and the content of the discussion was shocking to many.
Identified as Zachary Ro, the young boy submitted a fishbowl question to the Democratic presidential candidate asking if the young former mayor would help him announce to the world that he identifies as homosexual. He was with his parents, who are likely supporters of the aspiring POTUS.
CNN detailed the "emotional moment" between Buttigieg and the youth in an article detailing all of the "advice" Pete gave.
Time for a Don Lemon Party
"Thank you for being so brave," the young boy wrote. "Would you help me tell the world I’m gay, too? I want to be brave like you."
Despite what the kid may think of himself, the openly-gay candidate let the boy know that he was actually pretty brave for asking the question in the first place. Especially in such a public forum.
"I don’t think you need a lot of advice for me on bravery. You seem pretty strong to me," he responded. "It took me a long time to figure out how to tell even my best friend that I was gay, let alone to go out there and tell the world and to see you willing to come to terms with who you are in a room full of 1,000 people, thousands of people you’ve never met that’s, that’s really something."
But in the interest of drawing the event out for as long as possible, perhaps for the desperately needed dosage of good PR it would bring him, Pete did hand down "a couple of things that might be useful."