Rachel Maddow (Again) Mocks Franklin Graham, Now For His Explanation For Moving To A Pro-LGBT Bank

Rachel Maddow, for the second night in a row, is quite enjoying Franklin Graham’s embarrassing anti-gay actions.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow opened Thursday night’s show with a look at various gay pride parades, including South Florida’s Miami Beach gay pride parade, which she notes “also stands out for its role in one of the most hilariously satisfying news stories of this summer so far.”

Maddow detailed the now well-know story that Franklin Graham, scion of the iconic evangelical preacher Billy Graham, last week was so enraged that Wells Fargo bank aired a TV ad showing a lesbian couple learning sign language so they could adopt a young deaf girl, he announced he was pulling his millions out of Wells Fargo.

And so he moved his accounts, including those of his father’s Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and of their charity, Samaritan’s Purse, to BB&T bank, which, amusingly, is a proud supporter of, yes, South Florida’s Miami Beach gay pride parade.

In a Thursday USA Today op-ed, Franklin Graham explained why it was OK to boycott Wells Fargo while doing business with BB&T.

“So why did we move from one bank to the other? Because, in our view, Wells Fargo went beyond being gay-friendly to being a public advocate — through a national TV advertising campaign — for a lifestyle we, as a Christian organization, believe to be biblically wrong,” Graham explained.

“I think there is a difference between being friendly and being a public advocate. By staying at Wells Fargo, we would not only be associating with the promotion of a lifestyle we believe to be wrong, we also would actually be helping to pay for the advertisements by virtue of banking with them — because a bank has no money to advertise with other than the money its customers place in its trust and the interest earned on that money. We simply chose not to continue doing business with a bank that is promoting something that violates our conscience and beliefs.”

Calling the story “delicious” and “funny,” Maddow points out there’s no difference between airing an ad that respectfully depicts a same-sex couple adopting a special needs child, and financially supporting a gay pride parade.

Maddow moved on from Graham’s ridiculousness, to the fact that the fight for LGBT rights and equality is not over, and far from it.

She details the stories of two “really radical” losses on the equality front Thursday. 

As NCRM reported yesterday, Michigan governor Rick Snyder signed into law three bills that allow all adoption agencies, including those that are tax-funded (although Maddow did not make a point of that important fact), to refuse to let LGBT people and same-sex couples adopt children if they claim a sincerely held religious belief against it.

The second was the North Carolina legislature’s successful override of its governor’s veto of a “religious freedom” bill that allows magistrates to refuse to marry same-sex couples.

The LGBT community is gaining on the civil rights front, but make no mistake: regardless of whichever way the Supreme Court decides, there will still be a great deal more work to do.

 

Image: Screenshot via MSNBC