Longtime homophobe and Trump ally Franklin Graham is claiming that LGBTQ people are pushing a “godless, secular agenda” onto President-elect Joe Biden.
Graham, who has previously compared LGBTQ people to drug addicts and called gay people “the enemy” of churches, made the comments in a Facebook post last week.
The son of evangelist Billy Graham decried a call from the Human Rights Campaign urging President-elect Biden to reinstate nondiscrimination rules in higher education, PinkNews reports.
“LGBTQ activists within the Democratic Party are pushing their godless, secular agenda with a potential Biden Administration,” Graham wrote. “If you don’t conform to their ideology, agree with their sinful beliefs, teach what they say is right, they want to close you down. They will pressure and bully politicians to get their way.”
Graham said it was “extremely dangerous” if LGBTQ people were “permitted to proceed unchecked,” claiming without evidence that they would “go after the accreditation of Christian colleges, then Christian ministries and churches next, to strip them of tax-exempt status and try to force them to operate under policies that go against biblical teaching.”
“This is not only an attack on free speech and expression, but also an attack on our religious liberty,” he continued.
Graham said that LGBTQ people asking not to be discriminated against “shows why who we vote for is so important.”
“We’ve had four years of an administration under President Donald J. Trump that staunchly defends religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the church,” he said. “We can see that the one who holds the office of President of the United States has tremendous ramifications on our day-to-day lives and for the future of this nation.”
Graham drew controversy earlier this year after establishing an overflow hospital for COVID-19 patients in New York City that required workers to sign an anti-LGBTQ “statement of faith.” Medical workers were expected to agree to evangelical Christian doctrine, particularly with regard to human sexuality and the fixed, binary nature of gender.
In defending the statement, Graham reiterated his opposition to same-sex marriage and implied that LGBTQ people and those who support same-sex marriage are in the same undesirable category of worker as drunks and drug users.
Graham has previously said he loves homosexuals “enough to care to warn them that if they want to continue living like this, it’s the flames of hell for you.”
Last year, he blamed historically high rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis in the United States on Hollywood and gay relationships, adding, “God made us male and female and gave sex for us to enjoy inside a marriage relationship between a man and a woman — not two men, not two women. The Bible says that anyone who sins sexually, sins against their own body. How true.”
In 2016, he slammed a monument to the LGBTQ rights movement outside the Stonewall Inn in New York a “monument to sin,” and the year prior complained about a Wells Fargo commercial featuring a same-sex couple, calling it a “tide of moral decay that is being crammed down our throats by big business, the media, and the gay & lesbian community.”
Related:
Anti-gay pastor who claimed COVID-19 was judgment on gays dies from virus
Pastor threatens school with lawsuit after daughter sent home for homophobic t-shirt
Anti-gay evangelical pastor fumes about the Pope’s support for same-sex civil unions
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