Oops: How Tucker Carlson's Feud With Pete Buttigieg Brought Positive Attention to the Biden Agenda
Paid family leave.
As someone who worked to help pass paid family and medical leave as part of a broad coalition in my state, I was surprised to see the issue emerge on the national stage last week. Of course, the news wasn't about the positive impact of the policy in nine separate states or the fact that the policy is included in President Biden's Build Back Better legislation currently being considered by Congress. Instead, what we got was a national conversation generated by none other than human tire fire and adult Chucky doll Tucker Carlson, whose pea-sized brain couldn't comprehend how or why Secretary Pete Buttigieg would need to take time off to care for his newly adopted twin children. Buttigieg responded to Fox's phallic fuhrer by going there and calling out Carlson, whose college yearbook revealed him to be part of a group that admired Dan White, the man who assassinated San Francisco politician and LGBT trailblazer Harvey Milk. Knowing he'd been served, Carlson attempted to save face a day later with a weak sarcastic response calling Buttigieg a "dwarf fraud" but the conversation had already gone viral with paid family and medical leave being on all the national news stories and Secretary Pete Buttigieg now the face of an issue that means so much to so many people.
Tucker Carlson is not a serious man but his views are by and large in line with today's Republican Party. The party of family values no longer represents families or values but instead caters to the dark, sinister view that Carlson so beautifully articulated. Despite Carlson now playing off his original comment as a "joke" there was an intent behind it and that intent was to demean and degrade Secretary Buttigieg because he is a threat to Carlson's worldview. You see, to Tucker Carlson, open homophobe and parent of four children of his own, there should be no such thing as paid family leave, and even if there were, it most certainly shouldn't apply to a gay man. Carlson's original quip about Buttigieg needing time off to breastfeed was a clear indication that he simply doesn't understand the modern role of a male parent. Carlson, like so many in today's GOP, believes in fixed gender roles. He believes that a stay-at-home wife should be barefoot in the kitchen raising the kids while her man goes out and provides for his family. After all, Carlson's own wife, Susan is a stay-at-home mom so why shouldn't every woman serve in this way?
What's ironic is that Pete Buttigieg is so much more of a man than Tucker Carlson is or will ever be. Buttigieg served in Afghanistan, was an elected official who served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and now serves as Secretary of Transportation. Carlson is a White supremacist who wears a bow-tie on national television and had his CNN show Crossfire canceled in 2005 three months after Jon Stewart ripped him a new one for the way the show debased political discourse. Like Trump, Carlson projects his insecurities on others, a sure sign of someone who is a mental midget as well as a coward. His antiquated views on gender roles might play well to his nightly Fox News audience but for the 84% of Americans who support paid family leave and the 70% of Americans who support marriage equality, Carlson has shown himself to once again be painfully out of touch on the issues. Not only that, but he gifted Secretary Buttigieg a golden Sunday talk show opportunity to share how paid family leave is another immensely popular piece of the Biden Administration's Build Back Better legislation currently being debated by Congress. All this was the result of Carlson wanting to make a homophobic quip to score some cheap laughs from his adoring audience of racist homophobes.
Nobody accused Tucker Carlson of being smart. And this latest incident shows once again just how badly the GOP has lost the culture wars. Americans support marriage equality and they support paid family and medical leave for both mothers and fathers. What is emerging with millennials and Gen Z are generations that don't feel tied down to traditional gender roles. These are the Modern Family generations who are used to seeing blended families in television and pop culture. Many of us have gay friends or colleagues who have gone through the adoption process. We've seen the outpouring of emotion the moment they meet their adopted child or children. We know that they will have the same trials and tribulations as "traditional" families but the love they give to their non-biological children will ultimately be the same. While this may confuse and confound someone like Tucker Carlson, the vast majority of younger generations are simply becoming accustomed to this way of life. It doesn't seem strange or weird to us. The only strange thing is how and why more states don't provide paid family and medical leave for couples in the exact same situation as Secretary Buttigieg.
A question that is now part of a national discourse, thanks to none other than Tucker Carlson.