Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Presidential candidate, gave a most extraordinary speech on Sunday. Buttigieg is a gifted orator, and his speech was good by all conventional measures: well written, well paced, well delivered. But that’s not what made the talk unlike most political speeches. In the course of twenty minutes, Buttigieg both defended his right to exist and claimed his right to run for President of the United States, and this made his talk a document of a strange political moment.

Speaking at an annual event of the L.G.B.T.Q. PAC Victory Fund, Buttigieg recounted his coming-out story. “When I was younger, I would have done anything to not be gay,” he said. When he was as old as twenty-five, he said, “If you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water. . . . There were times in my life that, if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.”

Eventually, Buttigieg came to terms with his sexuality. In 2015, while running for reëlection as mayor, Buttigieg came out publicly and won his campaign. Earlier that year, Vice-President Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, invited prominent anti-gay campaigners to a private ceremony, during which he signed a “religious-freedom law” that effectively legalized anti-gay discrimination. That same year, Buttigieg met his future husband; the speech made it sound like the first man he dated became his husband. They had a June wedding. “My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man,” Buttigieg said. “And, yes, Mr. Vice-President, it has moved me closer to God.” After a long ovation, Buttigieg acknowledged that part of his audience is not religious, which mattered little to the point he was making—that he didn’t have a choice about being gay. He made this point as eloquently as it can be made. “If me being gay was a choice,” he said, “it was a choice that was made far, far above my pay grade. And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand—that if you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my Creator.”

This is standard gay-rights discourse. The movement for gay rights, including marriage equality, has taken as its premise that some people are born gay and are powerless to do anything about it. This line of argument aims to defuse a discussion of the morality of homosexuality by positing that sexuality is predetermined. It unsubtly validates the idea that if one had a choice, one would and should choose to be heterosexual. Buttigieg said as much: he would have been straight if he could have been straight.

There were many rational reasons for Buttigieg to want to be straight, and he mentioned some of them. When he was young, he could not have imagined being gay and being married; the right to same-sex marriage became the law of the land less than four years ago. When Buttigieg joined the reserves, it was illegal for him to be a soldier and be out. Buttigieg, the youngest of the Presidential candidates—and very nearly the youngest possible Presidential candidate—was already an adult in 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down the Texas sodomy law, reversing a 1986 decision that upheld the sodomy law in Georgia.

The argument on behalf of gay rights that gay people have no choice but to be gay is humiliating because it assumes that one kind of sexuality is desirable and that any deviation is, at best, acceptable. If it were a choice, the argument implies, only one choice would be valid. This is a basic argument for the right of queer people to exist: because they can’t help it. By giving it a religious framing, Buttigieg presented the humiliation inherent in the argument as something else—humility. Given that the argument is the premise of the political gay-rights movement, it is inevitable that the first openly gay Presidential candidate would speak of his sexuality in these terms. It is also chilling that, at a moment when it seems conceivable, at least for a minute, that a gay man could mount a successful bid for the Presidency, he also has to advance an argument for his right to be.