This week, Congress will replace a statue of a white supremacist with one of a queerphobe… and its unveiling ceremony on Thursday will likely be attended by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R), who has ties to anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalists.
A statue of influential anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical Christian Rev. Billy Graham statue will replace one of former North Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock (D). Aycock was an early 20th-century education advocate and slave owner who sought to permanently disenfranchise and subjugate Black voters. He said Black people contributed nothing to society, despite America’s wealth being built on the backs of unpaid Black labor.
The 7-foot-tall bronze statue of Graham will depict him gesturing toward an open Bible in his hand. Its base will have an inscription of two Bible verses that highlight his evangelistic ministry — John 3:16 and John 4:16 — the Associated Press reported. The $650,000 statue was paid for by The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
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The statue will be installed as part of the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. Its installation occurred, in part, because of a 2015 bill approved by North Carolina’s General Assembly asking for Graham to replace Aycock. Such replacements occur occasionally.
Graham — who had the rare honor of having his body lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda when he died in 2018 at the age of 99 — considered homosexuality to be a “sinister form of perversion” and AIDS as an anti-gay punishment from God (though he later walked back the latter comment).
He also mixed fire-and-brimstone faith and politics that paved the way for the religious right’s increased influence in mainstream politics. The powerful evangelical coalition that he helped create has only grown increasingly anti-LGBTQ+ over time.
“We traffic in homosexuality at the peril of our spiritual welfare,” Graham once said. In 2012, he urged North Carolina voters to support a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. He also once told then-President Richard Nixon that the media is run by Jews, adding, “This stranglehold [that Jews have] has got to be broken or this country is going down the drain.”
In addition to Johnson, the statue’s unveiling ceremony will be attended by other Republicans and some of Graham’s family members. Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, took over his father’s ministry and has made it much more actively anti-LGBTQ+.
Not only does Johnson have many deep ties to the anti-LGBTQ+ Christian Nationalist movement, but he also worked for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). While there, he argued that gay sex should be illegal. He has said that same-sex marriage will lead to “chaos and sexual anarchy,” people trying to marry their pets, and “pedophiles” seeking legal protections for having sex with kids. He has also said, “Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural… ultimately harmful and costly for everyone” and that America is “dark and depraved” because there are too many LGBTQ+ people. He’s also a proponent of debunked attempts to turn gay people straight.
