During a recent appearance on his wife Michelle’s podcast, Barack Obama shared a personal anecdote about having a gay college professor and suggested that boys today would benefit from having LGBTQ friends. He claimed such exposure helps instill “empathy and kindness,” and added that having those figures in a friend group could help if a child “is gay or nonbinary.”

“You need that person in your friend group,” Obama said, “so that if you then have a boy who’s gay or nonbinary or what have you, they have somebody they can go, ‘OK, I’m not alone in this.’”

He also said that even great fathers can’t do it all, and boys need other perspectives beyond just their dad’s.

The comments lit a firestorm of criticism from BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock, who slammed the former president’s remarks as “dangerous and delusional.” Whitlock argued that young boys need men rooted in faith and responsibility — not someone chosen because of their sexual identity.

“You need grandfathers, you need uncles, you need cousins, you need male teachers, you need deacons and elders in a church,” Whitlock said. “You need a heavenly father — that’s the real village.”

He was joined by BlazeTV contributor Virgil Walker, who called Obama’s framing “disgusting.” Walker questioned the logic of equating sexual orientation with the moral authority to guide children, especially when so many young black men grow up without strong fathers.

“To insinuate that young men in the black community need gay guidance rather than a father — which many are lacking — made no sense,” Walker said. “His comments minimize the fact that we are image-bearers of God.”

Walker also pushed back hard on the idea that a person’s sexual behavior should define their value as a mentor.

“The manner in which you choose to have sex has no bearing on your intellectual or moral leadership,” he said. “This reduces our identities to sexual activity — and particularly deviant sexual activity in a bedroom.”

Critics say the remarks from Obama are part of a larger cultural trend that emphasizes representation and identity at the expense of traditional values like faith, family, and moral clarity. They argue that the left is pushing young men to look to fringe or activist figures for affirmation, while minimizing the value of longstanding pillars like fathers, pastors, and community leaders.

Obama’s defenders argue he was simply calling for broader understanding in an increasingly diverse world, but his conservative critics aren’t buying it. To them, this is yet another example of progressive ideology replacing substance with symbolism — at a time when boys need strength and guidance more than ever.

Whether Obama’s words were meant to provoke or simply reflect his worldview, they’ve reignited a debate over who young men should look up to — and who’s being pushed out of that picture in modern America.