Billy graham and gays
Billy Graham leaves painful legacy for LGBTQ people
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 noun his actions hold 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 crucial figure foundation-builder for the evangelical coalition that came together in the delayed s 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 alabaster Mainline Protestants into an evangelical
College of Arts & Sciences
In , the Reverend Billy Graham asked an audience rhetorically, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” He then answered his control question: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.”
Graham later apologized for suggesting that the Almighty had unleashed the epidemic to punish homosexuals. Yet, the fact that an influential and popular pastor echoed views, however hesitantly, of harder-line clerics reflected the perception of many Christians, Professor of Religion Anthony Petro writes at the outset of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, ). The book revisits the history of the disease in the United States and religious reactions to it.
Petro says After the Wrath goes beyond most such accounts, which focus on the religious right’s reaction, to include mainstream and progressive denominations’ handling of the crisis. What began as a general health issue, he writes, became a pan-denominational discussion of morality and sexuality.
Petro faults even gay writers and activists for fostering notions that promisc
Billy Graham's Legacy Threatened By Family Split
For the Rev. Franklin Graham, the scathing editorial in Christianity Today last year calling his friend Donald Trump “a leader of grossly immoral character” and urging that Trump be “removed from office” was heretical.
To Graham, it was unpleasant enough to browse such an ambush on Trump. But the insult was compounded by the fact that Christianity Today had been founded by his recently deceased father, Billy Graham, the revered evangelist often called America’s Pastor. So Franklin fired back at the magazine with a powerful riposte to his millions of social-media followers:
I hadn’t shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in but because of @CTMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary disseminate now. My father knew [Trump], believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in the history for our nation.
That was too much for another Billy Graham descendant, his grandson Aram Tchividjian. In a response to his uncle’s send , Tchividjian wrote with withering sarcasm:
I’ll never forget that d It may seem unkind to criticize a beloved preacher who is about to turn 94 -- unless that preacher is an uncharitable Rev. Billy Graham spending his last years trying to defeat the movement for same-sex marriage. Graham has a reputation as a diplomatic evangelist who has largely sought to avoid the scorched path of fundamentalists preaching fire and brimstone. But the evangelist's near-endorsement of Gov. Mitt Romney, which included an affirmation of "the biblical definition of marriage," should verb as a revelation that for all his moderate ways Graham is just another anti-gay fundamentalist who cannot tolerate the presence of gay and lesbian couples within Christianity. Graham has long considered homosexual behavior to be a "sinister form of perversion," a lifestyle choice that will guide gays to personal ruin. When a young woman wrote him about her sexual love for another woman in , the evangelist replied with a threat: homosexual perverts will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. "Your affection for another of your own sex is misdirected and will be judged by God's holy s