Prominent evangelical pastor Franklin Graham said Sunday that LGBTQ activists are trying to ban “the truth of the Gospel” from British society by having him barred from preaching in the UK.
In parallel posts on Facebook and Twitter, Rev. Graham lamented efforts “by LGBTQ activists” to have his eight-city evangelistic tour across the UK cancelled.
“Opposition to the Gospel shouldn’t really surprise us. Jesus warned that it would come,” Graham wrote. “As you may know, my eight-city evangelistic tour across the UK has been met with resistance by LGBTQ activists who inaccurately claim that I am homophobic, Islamophobic, and say that I speak hate.”
“Anyone who knows me or has heard me speak knows that this really isn’t true — but, I DO preach the TRUTH of the Gospel. Could it be, rather, that these folks are truthophobic or free-speech-ophobic?” Graham asks.
Like many Christians, Rev. Graham has not hesitated to voice his disagreement with the 2015 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to impose same-sex marriage on the nation in Obergefell v. Hodges. Appealing to biblical morality, Graham has continued to assert that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, which was the predominant belief of humanity for all of history.
In his dissent from Obergefell, Justice Samuel Alito presciently wrote that the decision would be used to hurt Americans who may not share a contemporary view of marriage as a malleable, fluid arrangement between an unspecified number of unspecified persons.
“It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” he wrote.
In his Facebook post Sunday, Rev. Graham cites Australian Martyn Iles who asks if society “has become so ‘tolerant’ that it is now intolerant of mainstream Christianity.”
“This is really a fight for truth, and the Gospel is what is really being ‘banned’ from these venues,” Graham writes. “It really boils down to the fact that they disagree with the message.”
Speaking the truth of Christianity to people, even when the message is unwelcome, is “love speech,” Graham asserts, the opposite of hate speech.
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