Billy Graham and LGBTQ

The nation as a whole seems to be pretty sad at the passing of an evangelical superstar named Billy Graham.

Oh yeah....except for one group of folks...the LGBTQ.

Evangelicals across the country are mourning the death of Billy Graham, an influential preacher who died in his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on Wednesday. But while some are celebrating his legacy, others are grappling with the lasting damage his actions have done to their communities.

Over the course of Graham's 99 years of life, he reached millions of Christians around the world and had an outsized impact on the national political landscape. For many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, however, Graham was a crusader against them, one whose efforts shaped the religious right into an anti-LGBTQ political force.

"Graham was perhaps the most important figure foundation-builder for the evangelical coalition that came together in the late 1970s as the Christian Right," Heather White, a visiting assistant professor of religion at the University of Puget Sound, told NBC News. "He helped unite factionalized fundamentalists, hippie Jesus people and conservative-leaning white Mainline Protestants into an evangelical coalition."

White said Graham also helped connect this coalition to "the political process in general and to the Republican party in particularly, especially through his support for Nixon in the 1960s."

Graham himself had few specific words on LGBTQ people, at least when compared to the rest of his expansive canon, but his disapproval of homosexuality was unequivocal.

“Let me say this loud and clear!” Graham responded to a young woman who wrote to him in 1974 confessing her love for another woman. “We traffic in homosexuality at the peril of our spiritual welfare.” This was after Graham had claimed homosexuality to be a “sinister form of perversion” that was contributing to the decay of civilization, according to the book “Martin Luther King Jr., Homosexuality, and the Early Gay Rights Movement” by Michael G. Long.

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/billy-graham-leaves-painful-legacy-lgbtq-people-n850031

Here's how the rules work today in America....if you stand up for what the Bible clearly says, you are an intolerant-hater.

If you dare to suggest that the Creator of the Universe, Jesus Christ, can change us all from our sinful inclinations, whatever they are....then you may soon be classified as "mentally ill."

Thank you Billy Graham for always standing for the truth and doing it out of love.