Pete Buttigieg may be on the path to a White House bid, having just announced a $7 million campaign fundraising haul for the first quarter of the year, but on Monday, he took some time away from presidential pursuits to fulfill the mayoral duty of justice of the peace. The South Bend mayor was coming out of the restroom at City Hall when a young couple approached him and said he was the very person they’d been looking for.
As potential 2020 candidate and mayor, his time is tight, and he admitted he was reluctant to see what he said were those “rare few minutes of free time left” vanish, so he took the couple to his office in hopes of getting some of his staff to help them with their issue. Then, the couple, Mary and Gabe Jones, explained that Mary had a 9 a.m. appointment for a caesarean section, and they were hoping to be married before she delivered the baby.
It was about 8:15 a.m., Buttigieg noted in his Twitter and Facebook post. Mary Jones, he noted, had her paperwork for the wedding with her hospital papers, and they had come to the mayor’s office hoping he’d officiate.
“Obviously, there’s only one answer to that question,” Buttigieg wrote. “I corralled a few staff members as they were trickling into into the office, to serve as witnesses, and filled out the paperwork.”
The rings weren’t yet ready, so an enterprising staffer found a ribbon to substitute.
Within a few minutes, the couple was married and on their way to the hospital. And later Monday, they sent Buttigieg’s office a photo of his newest constituent, Jade Katherine Jones.
Buttigieg wrote, “It’s moments like this that I’ll miss when my term as mayor comes to an end.”
