Statue of white supremacist will be replaced with one of man who said AIDS is God’s punishment

Evangelists Billy (right) and his son Franklin Graham, who is also an outspoken homophobe
Photo by: Wikimedia Commons

The U.S. Capitol may soon display a statue to evangelist Billy Graham, who devoted his life to converting people to Christianity and promoted anti-LGBTQ sentiment when he was alive.

Every state gets to pick two people to honor with a statue in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, and the North Carolina legislature just approved a model for a statue of Graham – who was born in North Carolina – to replace the statue of a white supremacist.

Related: How Billy Graham paved the way for the religious right

Graham was perhaps the most influential American evangelist in the twentieth century and gave “spiritual counsel” to every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama before his death in 2018. Through what he called his “crusades” – basically revival meetings – he preached to 210 million people, according to one book on his life.

But he wasn’t known for welcoming all people into Christianity. In 1973, he said that homosexuality is a “sinister form of perversion” in his advice column, responding to a girl who wrote in and said she was in love with another girl.

“We traffic in homosexuality at the peril of spiritual welfare,” he wrote. “Your affection for another of your own sex is misdirected, and will be judged by God’s holy standards.”

He then claimed that…

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