(no subject)

[martasfic]

I do believe I'm officially pissed off. The friend I'm currently eating dinner with mentioned that Franklin Graham praised Putin as getting the LGBT issue right more than Obama because he was taking a stand to protect his country's children from gay propaganda.

And... Yeah. This is FG who's spent so much breath talking about the problem of Christian persecution around the world, which actually is a thing in some areas. I've been poking around while L. Is in the bathroom and.... Yeah. What more can I say? I've just recovered from a facepalm of Lestrade proportions. I respect the work those organizations do, but shit like this is just wrong.

I'll calm down in a bit and enjoy the night. Then I'll go home and write fanfic. It was going to be vague on the friendship/slash issue, but the drive to make it PG and give a certain someone credit in the notes is currently oh so tempting

Comments

[alexcat.livejournal.com]

I believe Billy Graham actually has tried to serve God as best he could but Franklin is a world class ass. Plain and simple.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

You know, it's a decent question why I care so much. When Pat Robertson goes off like this, I just roll my eyes and move on; hearing this all but reduced me to tears because it was just so wrong.

The obvious answer is it's personal. I grew up in Boone, NC (where Franklin's own ministry, Samaritan's Purse, is based). My parents work for him, and I know quite a few other people that do. I worked for them a few months doing administrative work to support Katrina cleanup (like corresponding with work teams from churches going down there, managing a report on homes repaired, etc.). So I know all kinds of people who actually have a positive impact through that group, and know they really are moved to help. I've even met Franklin a few times and, from what I know of him, his heart's in the right place when it's boots-on-the-ground kind of work.

Not his politics, though. This statement was just so wrong on so many levels. I want to ask him what he thinks is gay propaganda, whether he really think a kid will turn gay because he sees two men holding hands in the Red Square, how the f!@# he'd feel if the Ayatollah or the king (whatever the title?) of Saudi Arabia had a relationship to a leading Muslim church the way Putin does with the Russian Orthodox Church and was using it to punish through the force of law those that particular church thinks are bad. I want to ask him where the hell he gets off saying things like this in a Southern drawl like my own and in the name of my God, when I've seen what these kinds of words have done to actual living, breathing humans bearing the imago dei who also happen to be gay.

And it pisses me off. Because it is personal. Because he seems to be coming from the same place as me, so it seems like at some level we're connected.

It would be better if I couldn't care so much, obviously. Something about this particular person speaking out on these things just drives me up the wall, no matter how hard I try to distance myself on them. But at the same time... I'm connected to him, I know the people who work with him, I've been given opportunities myself. So it's complicated for me, I guess.

[alexcat.livejournal.com]

As a person who has no connections, Franklin seems like an opportunistic ass to the rest of us. It seems to the rest of us that like Jesus, he wants 'to do a little walking too' as Charlie Daniels said. He simply is NOT his father.