Franklin Graham speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Anti-LGBTQ+ evangelist Franklin Graham will deliver the invocation for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, according to a copy of the program that was circulated on X.
Graham, who serves as president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization, and of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which was named for his late father, offered the opening prayer for Trump’s first inauguration in 2017.
As documented by GLAAD, the Asheville, North Carolina-based evangelist has attacked the LGBTQ+ community throughout his life and career.
He supported the draconian laws in Russia targeting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” that have been used to suppress media that presents “LGBTQ identities and relationships in a positive or normalizing light.”
Praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for taking “a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of the gay and lesbian agenda,” Graham also bemoaned that “America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue.”
Graham’s anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy on matters of domestic policy in the U.S. has included opposing Pride events, which he compared to celebrations of “lying, adultery, or murder,” and curricula on LGBTQ+ history in public schools, telling a radio host in 2019 that educators have no right to “teach our children something that is an affront to God.”
When his home state rolled back rules prohibiting gender diverse people from using public restrooms consistent with their identities, he tweeted that “people of NC will be exposed to pedophiles and sexually perverted men in women’s public restrooms.”
Graham has repeatedly smeared LGBTQ+ people as predatory and said the community seeks to “recruit” children into being gay, lesbian, or transgender.
He has also consistently opposed same-sex marriage, claiming that former President Barack Obama, by embracing marriage equality, had “shaken his fist at the same God who created and defined marriage,” adding, “it grieves me that our president would now affirm same-sex marriage, though I believe it grieves God even more.”
Graham also supports the harmful and discredited practice of conversion therapy, which he likened to “conversion to Christianity.”
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced his bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, Graham tweeted that “Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian. As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman — not two men, not two women.”
Graham embraced Trump well before he was taken seriously in Republican politics, telling ABC in 2011 that the New York real estate tycoon was his preferred candidate.
Particularly during the incoming president’s first campaign as the GOP nominee and during his first term, the evangelical leader’s support was seen as strategically important to bringing conservative Christians into the fold despite their misgivings about Trump, who was better known as a philandering womanizer than a devout religious leader.
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