Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) said a gay president is more likely to be a Republican because Black voters are "not ready" to elect one.
Van Orden made the remarks Thursday in an interview with TMZ outside the U.S. Capitol.
Reporter Charlie Cotton asked the congressman about former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the country is ready to elect a gay president.
"He said that he thinks America is now ready to have a gay president. Do you think America is ready?" Cotton asked.
"I'm endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans, which are a group of conservatives that happen to have a different view on who they wanna be with than me. You know what I mean?" Van Orden answered.
The Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing gay conservatives, endorsed him, according to the organization's April endorsement list. Van Orden went on to tell Cotton that he had never thought about people in those terms, even as a child, and that a candidate's sexuality was "irrelevant" to him.
"But do you think it's irrelevant to most Americans?" Cotton asked.
"Traditionally, if you look at statistics, if you're doing political science, African Americans don't want to vote for homosexuals," Van Orden said.
Cotton had asked about Americans in general. The congressman narrowed his answer to a single racial group, and during the interview he named no survey, study or pollster to support it.
"So, I mean, again, the political science — the Democratic Party needs to carry African American votes, or they'll never get anybody elected," Van Orden continued. "And statistically speaking, if you look at their actual, you know, polling stuff, African Americans are not ready to vote for a gay candidate."
"So you think it'd be more likely that there was a gay Republican president than a gay Democratic president then?" Cotton asked.
"Well, if you wanna look at it objectively, yeah," Van Orden said.
Van Orden confronted staff at the Prairie du Chien Memorial Library in June 2021, before he was first elected, over a Pride Month display in the children's section, Wisconsin Watch reported. He told employees the books were inaccurate, checked out nearly all of them and returned them less than a week later.
"I unequivocally support equal rights for all Americans," Van Orden said in a statement responding to the account at the time.
