The evangelical hate preacher Franklin Graham has unsurprisingly praised two horrific anti-trans bills that have just passed in Idaho.
The first bill, HB509, bans trans people from changing the gender on their birth certificates, flouting a previous a federal court ruling on the issue. The second, HB500, bans schools and colleges from letting trans girls take part in girls’ sports.
Under the “mean-spirited” law, girls whose sex is “disputed” will be required to subject themselves to invasive testing to show medical evidence of their “internal and external reproductive anatomy”.
In addition, pupils who believe they have been “disadvantaged” by their transgender classmates will be able to sue their schools for damages.
Entirely in keeping with his vile position on LGBT+ issues, Franklin Graham gave his backing to both laws in a Facebook post that gleefully celebrated the bills’ passing.
“It’s about time someone started doing something to protect athletic opportunities for women and girls – and Idaho was the first!” he wrote.
“This week the state made the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law, barring biological males from participating in girls’ and women’s sports. Thank you to Representative Barbara Ehardt for sponsoring this important bill and to Idaho Governor Brad Little for signing it into law.
“State Senator Lee Heider is right,” said Graham, “‘Boys are boys and girls are girls. No doctor, no judge, no Department of Health and Welfare is going to change that reality.’ I hope all of our other states will do the same – don’t you?”
Graham hit the headlines this week as his charity, Samaritan’s Purse, is staffing the 68-bed coronavirus field hospital in New York’s Central Park.
All volunteers working in the makeshift hospital are required to sign an 11-point anti-LGBT+ belief statement which declares that they “believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”
It adds that “human sexuality is to be expressed only within the context of marriage” between a man and a woman, and that those who stray from the puritanical beliefs will face “damnation and eternal punishment” in hell.
Despite the incredibly discriminatory staff pledge, Graham promised he wouldn’t discriminate against anyone – although one gay man says that he already has.