“His rhetoric is to diminish and remove rights away from people like myself, and I can’t support that,” the Republican representative says
George Santos and Ron Desantis (Getty Images)
Rep. George Santos, who is openly gay, said he feels betrayed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis after the GOP presidential candidate released a blatantly anti-LGBTQ video on Friday.
“I used to think he was a great governor,” Santos told The Hill. “Now, I’m starting to think differently.”
Santos has publicly endorsed Donald Trump, but supported DeSantis’ much-protested “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which became law last year. It bans grade school teachers from mentioning gender identity and sexual orientation to their students.
In an April 2022 Facebook video, Santos said, “As a gay man, I stand proudly behind not teaching our children sex or sexual orientation.”
“I still stand by the bill in its nature, but now it seems that it had a more perverse agenda behind it,” said the congressman, who is buried in his own controversies for a series of lies about his background and for financial misconduct.
Santos added, “I’m starting to see [DeSantis] for what he is. His rhetoric is to diminish and remove rights away from people like myself, and I can’t support that.”
Santos pled not guilty in May to numerous federal charges, including fraud, money laundering and lying on disclosure forms during his 2022 campaign. He still plans to run for reelection.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is also gay, also slammed DeSantis for his “strange” video, which inexplicably features clips of movie hunks like Christian Bale in “American Psycho” and Brad Pitt in “Troy.”
“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, which is, again, who are you trying to help?” he said.
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