Going After Pete Buttigieg and The Weaponization of Children By The Right
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| Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks during a town hall hosted by VoteVets May 13, 2025 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. | Julia Hansen/Iowa City Press-Citizen / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images |
He rightly called the experience the “darkest hours” of his life. On Friday, Buttigieg revealed in a Substack post that an anonymous caller had reported false accusations to Michigan Child Protective Services (CPS), claiming he had committed unspeakable violent crimes against his children.
A CPS worker and a Michigan State Police officer showed up at his door in Traverse City, Michigan. Forensic interviews were arranged for his children, and he was instructed not to be alone with them until the process was complete. He was forced to spend the night away from them.
This incident happened during Pride Month. It happened days after he posted photos of his family for Father’s Day. The timing, almost certainly, was not an accident.
Buttigieg described the episode as a form of swatting that deployed CPS instead of a SWAT team. He called it “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in public service began,” surpassing death threats, political attacks, and time in a war zone.
“They are four years old,” he wrote. “Four. They do not know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is.” The fact that someone weaponized the child welfare system, a system that exists to protect vulnerable kids, as a tool of political terror against a gay man, for the crime of being a gay man with children, is horrific.
It begs the question: Is there any bottom to the hate that exists in this country when children are the target? The answer is a resounding no.
The same week that Buttigieg and his husband Chasten were being separated from their twins, the Republican-led Texas State Board of Education passed a mandatory reading list on a 9-4 party-line vote that forces Christian Bible stories into public school curricula across the state.
Elementary students will be required to read picture-book versions of “David and Goliath” and “Daniel and the Lion’s Den.” By middle school, they’ll encounter passages from the Sermon on the Mount, which offers an upside-down moral vision that prizes humility, mercy, and peacemaking over power and retribution, putting it at odds with much of today’s GOP politics.
High schoolers will read about Adam and Eve.
The list will affect more than 5 million students, which constitutes roughly one in ten of all public school children in America. That is gobsmacking.
Supporters laughably claim the Bible is “an essential piece of literature.” But the motive for this move has absolutely nothing to do with the Bible as a literary masterwork. It has everything to do with forcing Christianity down the throats of innocent children.
“If I’m reading to one of my students – they’re Muslim, or they’re atheist – I can say all day long, ‘We’re teaching a theme, we’re teaching symbolism,’ but they’re hearing, ‘This is a Bible story. We’re talking about God,” a Dallas-area teacher said.
The president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State called it part of “a broader movement to misuse public schools to impose one narrow set of religious beliefs and indoctrinate a new generation of Americans.”
That new generation includes Jewish children, Muslim children, Hindu children, and atheist children. It also includes queer children who are already navigating a world that sends them daily signals that they are not normal, and that if their families consist of same-sex parents, they are living in sin.
These kids will now be forced to sit in a classroom and absorb these sanctimonious lessons in hate, dictated by a far-right political movement that has spent years legislating against their existence and the existence of their families.
The Buttigieg swatting and the Bible bill are inextricably linked. The far right has increasingly made children a primary target, not because children have done anything wrong, but because children are at the heart of it all, where the future begins.
When you target the children of queer parents, you terrorize families who have been deemed sinners by the Christian right. When you mandate Christianity in classrooms, you capture the next generation before it can think for itself.
Ironically, children often rebel against beliefs that are forced on them, especially when religion is presented as a political mandate rather than a moral guide.
The laws stripping healthcare from trans youth, the campaigns to scrub queer families from school libraries, and the bills designed to make LGBTQ+ people invisible in public life all rest on the same Christian conviction – that queer people do not deserve to exist in a society that the far right believes should be reserved only for white, straight people.
What was done to Buttigieg is a very serious crime. Swatting, including CPS variants involving false reports, is a federal and often a state crime, carrying penalties ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, including jail sentences of multiple years.
Buttigieg said that if there is any way to pursue civil or criminal charges, he will do so. The person who did this should face the full weight of the law, and their case should serve as a warning to anyone considering a copycat attack on queer families in their own communities.
Because that is the other danger. Buttigieg’s story is receiving wide coverage, and there are people watching who see not an outrage but an idea for harming queer people. Anonymous CPS reports require no courage and leave few fingerprints. They can be filed against any queer couple anywhere in America.
Gay and lesbian parents need to be aware of this and remain extra vigilant.
The Texas Bible mandate will, rightfully, face legal challenges. But in the world we live in, that provides little solace. If this reaches the Supreme Court, a ruling in favor of the Texas Board of Education is a foregone conclusion.
Buttigieg wrote that politics now feels “more and more like bloodsport.” He’s right. The swatting of his family and the forcing of the Bible on children prove that modern politics is no longer about winning arguments.
It is about drawing blood and using children as the knife.
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