LGBT Americans remember Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi for her very special and repeated attempts to deny them the legal right to same-sex marriage. Anderson Cooper clearly recalled that too while interviewing Bondi about her sudden positioning as a champion and defender of LGBT people in the wake of the Orlando shootings.
"Do you really think you're a champion of the gay community," he said, after noting that many LGBT Floridians were calling her a “hypocrite” for saying she would protect them following the massacre. Cooper also noted the irony that the hotline Bondi's been promoting so that family members and spouses could get information about their loved ones would be useless to same-sex partners who weren’t allowed to marry.
"Had there been no same-sex marriage, he said, you do realize that there would be no spouses, that boyfriends and girlfriends of the dead would not be able to get information and would not be able probably even to visit them in the hospital here. Isn't there a sick irony in that?"
Cooper was downright dogged. More details (and video) from Aaron Blake are below.
Bondi notably, in 2014, wrote in court papers that Florida allowing the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states would "impose significant public harm." (Cooper used the words "induce public harm.")
That's when things got heated.
"Do you really think you're a champion of the gay community?" he asked.
Bondi emphasized that she was sworn to uphold the Constitution of Florida and that Florida voters had passed a ban on same-sex marriage (it passed with 62 percent support in 2008). "It had nothing to do -- I've never said I don't like gay people," Bondi protested. "That's ridiculous."
Cooper, who in 2012 became the first openly gay prime-time news anchor, didn't back down, though, focusing on the use of the word "harm" in the court papers.
"Doesn't that send a message to some people who might have bad ideas in mind?" he asked.
"Anderson, I don't believe gay people could do harm to the state of Florida," Bondi said.
Then Cooper asked again. And again. By the end, he'd asked some version of that question five times.
Better yet, watch the vid: