I never espoused a total meritocracy, hence "sufficiently" qualified. Though also, and I made this same argument back when I was defending Amy Coney Barrett from people saying Trump was playing identity politics, but you can usually find a perfectly qualified candidate even if you decide they have to meet some qualification that's unrelated to merit.

The same applies here. Where it stops applying is when ludicrous lefties want to find some unicorn who's a black, gay, trans woman, since there aren't very many of them to begin with. When that is your criteria, you end up with someone unqualified. When your criteria is "straight white man" or "woman" your selection pool is like half of the available candidates because plenty of those kinds of people exist in our country.

Now, you're not totally wrong on race. If there was no good white candidate I'd agree, as my position is not "don't pick a non-white dude" but instead "pick a white dude", however there are absolutely plenty of equally good candidates that are white and so it should be no issue to pick one of them.

And I never said I had any religious standing for the white part (though I'm sure I could conjure something logical up. God did separate the nations, and gave different nations to different peoples), and because of that it's the qualifier I care the least about. However, until the demonization of the white race ceases, I'm perfectly fine holding to the position that white people should be preferred for these roles. That's an active preference for something, as opposed to a specific aversion to something.

Edit: Also, to be clear after rereading your initial comment, and since this comment mainly focuses on scenarios where there's no most qualified: I would absolutely turn down a gay dude even if he was objectively the most qualified.

Frankly, I'd argue that being gay precludes one from being qualified to run a country in the first place. Society can not stand on rejection of God. At that point we are already doomed to destruction and failure.

That of course doesn't apply to race, though I'd likely apply it to gender as well.