Franklin Graham gets told off on his hypocrisy over his rebuke of Pete Buttigieg

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has been rising in the polls and sweeping in fundraising dollars (from Hollywood, among other places), thanks to poised town hall and interview performances, an impressive intellect, his genial and calm demeanor, and his generational change message, which does seem to have resonance.

He has also handled his sexual identity and marriage with such grace and dignity (at the recent Victory Fund gathering, for example) as to impress both straight and LGBTQ audiences.

As Jamie Kirchick, a gay NeverTrump Republican, wrote: ‘Buttigieg is a model of conventional, bourgeois gay domesticity, and one who frequently quotes Christian scripture unironically. The heterosexual president whom Buttigieg hopes to defeat (and our self-proclaimed “moral majority” hypocritically supports) has been married three times, bribed a porn star to prevent her from publicizing allegations of adulterous peccadilloes, been accused by multiple women of sexual assault, bragged obscenely on tape about molesting women, joked about dating his daughter, and once boasted that avoiding STDs was his “personal Vietnam.”

‘That an openly gay politician can convincingly portray himself as more virtuous than a straight opponent attests to more than just the character of the current president.’

As if Buttigieg had not gotten enough credit for his character, he caught a break: The hypocritical evangelical leader Franklin Graham, who has rationalized Trump’s infidelity and racism, ignored his lies, cheered his inhumane immigration policy and behaved as a political hack rather than a religious leader, attacked Buttigieg via Twitter:

Showing restraint and class, Buttigieg declined to respond to this hate-filled attack, and in doing so underscored the personal qualities Kirchick and others have praised. (“The fact that a gay politician can say of a straight one, with absolute plausibility, ‘It is hard to look at this president’s actions and believe that they’re the actions of somebody who believes in God’ is not just a sign that the religious left is successfully fighting the religious right on its own rhetorical turf,” Kirchick writes.)

However, even though Buttigieg chose to ignore the hypocritical Graham, some others were not about to let go of the opportunity to school the evangelist.

Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough went off on Graham, with Scarborough saying: “Just shut up, Franklin Graham! You are a disgrace! You are a disgrace for normalizing Donald Trump’s behavior…”

He added: “Here’s a man, who along with so many people in my community, the evangelical community, attacked Bill Clinton for his personal failings. They are now using their position, these evangelical leaders, they are now using their positions to gain political power and apologize for Donald Trump. Now suddenly Franklin Graham’s talking about lifestyles and sinning, and a guy who has gone through a very difficult personal journey to figure out who he really is, he’s criticizing them for that? It’s not a lifestyle choice. Anyone who’s heard Pete Buttigieg talk knows that.”

Also, Fr. James Martin, weighed in on Graham’s rebuke.

“Being gay isn’t a sin,” he tweeted. “It’s the way that God made some people. And be careful about biblical literalism. E.g., should we stone people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:2)? Also, be careful: the Bible says a lot about marriage. Solomon, Moses and Abraham all had multiple wives.”

Over the last few years, Fr. Martin has been very critical of the Catholic Church’s prejudice. His book, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity, criticizes the Church’s pastoral approaches to those who identify as gay, lesbian, or transgendered.

“The real purpose of this book is to advocate for a relaxation of the Church’s teaching that sodomy is gravely immoral and that any attraction to commit acts of sodomy is an objective disorder in one’s personality,” noted Fr. Gerald Murray when the book was first published. “The thesis of this book is that lesbians, gays, bisexual persons and transsexual/transgendered persons have been made to be such by God, and thus they should gladly live and express their God-given, differently ordered sexuality in a differently ordered way.”