When Mayor Pete Buttigieg announced he was gay in a South Bend Tribune op-ed in 2015, at the ripe old coming-out age of 33, his rhetoric was anything but revolutionary. He had struggled for years, he wrote, to recognize his sexuality as “just a fact of life, like having brown hair.” He was still the same guy his constituents had elected four years earlier, he wanted them to know. “Being gay,” he insisted, “has had no bearing on my job performance in business, in the military, or in my current role as mayor.”

The first time I interviewed Buttigieg in 2018, he’d won a second term, married a junior-high teacher named Chasten Glezman, and started to ponder a long shot presidential bid. I began with what had bugged me about his coming-out piece. Being queer myself, I said, I couldn’t comprehend how he saw being a member of an often-despised minority as having “no bearing” on the way he did his job. Did he still feel that way? Buttigieg basically didn’t budge from what he’d written three years earlier. “I do think we all bring our whole personal combination of experiences to every role that we have, and to our jobs,” he allowed, but added a bit pointedly: “I find it frustrating when a framework is imposed on you that asks you to represent a part of your identity rather than your ideas.”

Good luck with that now, Mayor Pete. This past weekend, the Afghan War veteran lobbed a live grenade in the direction of anti-gay Christians when he addressed a gathering of the LGBTQ Victory Fund in Washington. His former reticence was gone, replaced by an excruciating honesty. “There were times in my life,” he said, “when if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.” But if there had been a “cure,” he said, “the best thing in my life, my marriage, might not have happened at all. Thank God there was no pill. Thank God there was no knife.”

Then he made the personal political. “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.”

That was more than enough to send the vice president’s admirers into apoplectic fits, but Buttigieg wasn’t content to stop with his rendition of “Born This Way.” For denizens of the religious right, there was a greater provocation to come: His marriage hadn’t just made him “more compassionate, more understanding, more self-aware and more decent,” he said. “My marriage to Chasten has made me a better man. And yes, Mr. Vice President, it has moved me closer to God.”