Thing is though, he was anti-gay was he not? That is a massive black mark against anyone and I don’t think being religious gives him a free pass.
Anything other than praise was a hijack? I disagree. I understand you might disagree with my characterization, and that’s fine, but delving in to argue about it would be a hijack.
Also thought that the women was as a wife, mother and homemaker.
He denied having agreed with Nixon’s antisemitic opinions. Then, only when declassified Nixon tapes came out which confirmed his antisemitic statements, said it was a long time ago and didn’t represent his views anymore. He might have had more credibility in saying it didn’t represent his views if he’d said that before tapes provided undeniable evidence of his statements. Billy Graham - Wikipedia
He was a smiling, chummy version of Jerry Falwell.
Not that this totally excuses any of his beliefs, but he was a 99 year old white Southerner. I do wonder what he would have thought on the matter if he was in his right mind in the last decade. It is not a mark in his favor, though, no.
OTOH, Westboro Baptist Church is planning on picketing his funeral and is saying that Graham is now in Hell - which is generally my cue for when someone is a decent person.
The best you can say about him is that he wasn’t as filled with bile and hate as a lot of other evangelists but then that’s a low bar.
And I normally judge people’s decency by what they say and do, particularly in regard to treating everyone equally regardless of gender, sex, race, religion, sexuality etc. etc. You get the picture. If they don’t even come up to my standards then I’d be struggling to consider them “decent”.
The WBC are wingnut arseholes, I don’t think you can rely on them to have a consistent approach other than hating pretty much everyone, regardless of character. If Jesus came back today they’d probably denounce him for wearing his hair long and hanging round with a bunch of single young men.
In terms of race, one can say that Billy Graham exceeded the bar by quite a bit, especially in the 1950s. He also got in some hot water by other evangelicals for treating people of other faiths equally (probably why Westboro is protesting him). Probably could have been better on the others. However, other people of his age weren’t paragons of morality on those issues - Martin Luther King, Jr. for example, who was kind and worked closely with Bayard Rustin, but still saw homosexuality as physiological malady ( What would Martin Luther King Jr think of the LGBT rights movement? | PinkNews ), and King was born 10 years later than Graham (though one hopes Brother Martin would have evolved on his views if he was able to live past 1968)
Yes, he was, in a time when that was the norm. That’s still a common view among evangelicals. He didn’t campaign on it, but he did take a leading (though not foremost) role on racial integration.
Westboro criteria for protesting a funeral has 100% to do with media coverage and how prominent the deceased is, and 0% to do with who the person was and what they believed.
Here’s what Hitchens had to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1hl2jdfIiA
What makes him worthy of lying in repose in the US Capitol? He was a private, spiritual advisor to a number of presidents. Did he ever have an ‘official’ govenrnmental title, “Senior Junior Deputy Assistant Advisor to the President” or such?
Seems rather thumbing the nose at Jews, Atheists, & others.
Apparently it’s rare but not completely unprecedented for a private individual. I’m not sure why he was granted that honor, or whether he deserves it; but the fact that he was a spiritual adviser to so many Presidents is, arguably, a big deal.
It doesn’t seem that way to me.
Yesm Graham was a private individual, but he may still lay “In Honor” as it is called, in the Captol Rotunda. He’s not the first private individual to do so. I looked it up and there have been three before, according to one list. Only one was named however, Rosa Parks. She was not an elected official, was she?
No, she never ran for anything.
She always took the bus.
The full list. The 2 recent others were Jacob Joseph Chestnut and John Michael Gibson, United States Capitol Police officers killed at the U.S. Capitol in the line of duty on July 24, 1998. There have been quite a few others.
So glad to see Daniel Inouye did.
Now, that was one huge American hero.