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| Amy Grant |
Editor's note - Barring anything eventful taking place, this will be my last post before Christmas. See y'all on December 27. Happy holidays!
Well, well, well.
After all of the junk we've heard over the years from conservative evangelicals that there is a conspiracy to keep them from living in accordance to their faith, the truth has been revealed.
It was all bupkiss; a talking point manufactured to disguise their entitled yearnings to discriminate us as simply a genuine desire uphold their faith. Thank you, gospel singer Amy Grant for amplifying this path to revelation, although us LGBTQ people have been trying to tell the rest of y'all for years.
For those not aware, Amy Grant recently announced that she would be holding her niece's same-sex wedding at her farm. She said she is doing this because she wants to be supportive in accordance to her faith.
That sounds like a simple story, right? Think again.
Since her announcement, Grant has been swarmed by conservative evangelicals for supposedly "embracing sin." She has been called a sell-out, a fraud, a coward and worse. Even Franklin Graham took it upon himself to scold her on Twitter and his Facebook page, implying that she doesn't love her cousin enough to "tell her the truth" about the supposed sin of homosexuality.
The need for conservative evangelicals to condemn Grant shouldn't be a complicated argument. I don't see it as an argument of whether or not homosexuality is a sin. It's all about hypocrisy; particularly in light of how the phrase "religious freedom" has been drilled into the collective American consciousness. It's a phrase conservative evangelicals - both groups and personalities - like to use to put in gentler terms how they think that they should be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans in settings other than religious.
It's not enough for them to be able to castigate us in churches and other religious places. They want to have the right to discriminate against us in secular environments like stores and such. "Christians should not have to put their faith in the backseat no matter where it is, " they tell us. And with all of the power and connections at their disposal - and with the help of the conservative propaganda engine - they've created a narrative detailing stories of Christian business owners supposedly hounded into near bankruptcy by pushy gay people desirous to either make them abandon their faith or financially ruin them. They've even taken that narrative to court, winning several cases including a huge one at the Supreme Court involving a bakery in Colorado.
So one would think that these defenders of folks wanting to worship as they desire would be in Amy Grant's corner, defending her "religious freedom."
Not likely. Instead, they attack her, call her names, and try to shout her down because she's being living her faith in accordance to her standards instead of theirs.
Thus, we are now learning a lesson about the conservative evangelical definition of "religious freedom." To them, it means they should have the "religious freedom" to condemn gays and discriminate against us in the secular market. But folks like Amy Grant shouldn't have that same "religious freedom" to embrace and support LGBTQ people.
To conservative evangelicals like Graham and the rest who condemned Amy Grant, "religious freedom" isn't about freedom. It's about power and control. It is yet another demonstration of how these folks have reduced their faith to a filthy weapon designed to place themselves on a pedestal while crushing the rest of us under their heels.
Related post - Franklin Graham tries to 'cancel' Amy Grant for support of same-sex marriage. Has yet to 'cancel' Donald Trump.
