Taylor Swift Put Her Republican Senator on the Spot to Back LGBT Rights
Late Friday night, the studiously apolitical Taylor Swift got very political. Just an hour before the official start of Pride Month, she posted a letter to Twitter that she sent to Lamar Alexander, a Republican senator from her home state of Tennessee, asking him to support the Equality Act, a House-approved bill that would extend civil rights protections to LGBT people. In the letter, Swift wrote:
I personally reject the President’s stance that his administration "supports equal treatment of all" but that the Equality Act "in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights." No. One cannot take the position that one supports a community while condemning it in the next breath as going against ‘conscience’ or ‘parental rights.’ That statement implies that there is something wrong with being anything other than heterosexual and cisgender, which is an incredibly harmful message to send to a nation full of healthy and loving families with same-sex, non binary or transgender parents, sons or daughters.
Also on Friday,Trump tweeted out that his administration "stands in solidarity" with LGBT people, which is an objectively false statement. Trump and his officials have aggressively fought against and rolled back protections for LGBT people, focusing particularly on transgender people. Just the week before Trump made this claim, his Housing and Urban Development secretary, Ben Carson, announced that he was rescinding a rule that barred homeless shelters from discriminating against transgender people. Just two days later, the administration announced a new rule that would allow health-care providers to discriminate against patients based on their gender identity.
Swift also included a link to a Change.org petition supporting the Equality Act.
Originally Appeared on GQ
