Billy Graham Wants YOU (to Vote Republican) (2012)

 Originally posted as a Facebook Note October 21, 2012.

The Rev. Billy Graham, the justly venerated patriarch of Christian evangelism, and one of the true giants of his generation, took out a full-page ad in Section A of the Cedar Rapids Gazette today. If you don't live in Cedar Rapids, I imagine it made it into your Sunday paper as well. In it Dr. Graham hopes you will support candidates that oppose gay marriage, support banning abortion, and support allowing employers to decide whether their employees will have access to prescription contraceptives. He does this without using the words "gay," "abortion," or "contraceptive," which means you have to cut through a thicket of politically-correct euphemisms to get there, but there's where you get. Since these three positions (and their attendant euphemisms) are associated with the Republican party, that's what he's asking, and he'll have a happier birthday on Wednesday the 7th if enough of us do what he suggests on Tuesday the 6th. 

I'm not here to tell you to vote for either party; if Dr. Graham sees voting Republican as a Scriptural imperative, he does know a good bit more about the Bible than I do. I am, nonetheless, taking a stand as a Christian and a human being against the first of Dr. Graham's stances. Gay rights has long been a cause of mine, and most of you know that already; the arguments for and against gay marriage are in the public domain anyhow, so I won't bore you with details on either. To that discussion I only add, "Sanctity of marriage," my foot. My wife and I took our vows before God and everybody on June 3, 1989, and even if every gay person in America got married tomorrow, our marriage wouldn't be any less sanctified.

 Even granting Dr. Graham his right to the opposite position, and allowing for the prejudices of his generation, he makes two grievous errors in his presentation. First, beyond pretending he's not talking about gays (see above), he shows no love in his statement. There is no reference to gays as people loved by God and entitled to our love; there's no hint that they have any legitimate aspirations at all. Instead of affirming the humanity of all God's people, but stressing that according to his reading of the Bible even civil marriage is "a bridge too far," our common humanity with our gay brothers and sisters  is completely ignored. They're somehow a threat to our most sacred of institutions, I guess, so are treated as non-persons. 

Beyond that, there's a problem of perspective. Is the possibility that some gays with lifelong relationships may wish to be seen as married in the eyes of the state really, truly such an important problem that it gets first billing in this ad? That it should be the first thing in our minds when we vote? The economic recovery, such as it is, has left a lot of people in the ditch. The national government faces long-term deficits that are unsustainable. Environmental threats abound, and are already threatening huge swaths of God's creation. An increasing number of people are either uninsured, underinsured, or at risk of losing their insurance. Any number of people keep threatening to blow up the Middle East. The world is running out of water. There are terrorists. And this is just a brief list from the top of my head. I could go on. If gay marriage is a threat, which I do not grant that it is, it isn't even in the top 100 threats facing this nation, maybe not even the top 1000. 

Dr. Graham could have used his position, and the universal respect he has earned, to help bring America together on this or any other hot-button issue. Instead he presses those buttons himself, giving us political slogans he says are Scriptural. I've followed his career enough to say he doesn't have a hateful bone in his body. (The jury's still out on Franklin Graham, but that's another matter.) On this issue, however, he's used his prestige and apparently substantial budget to jump with both feet into the camp of the haters.