Franklin Graham: Destroying his father's work

I cannot say that Billy Graham was ever my favorite person in the world, but the man knew how to do outreach. He knew how to run a evangelizing crusade. He knew how to avoid the culture wars, because he (like the current Pope) knew that they antagonize people when you want to be attracting them. He probably had many of the same beliefs about race and sex and women as his contemporaries, but you didn't hear about them.

But his son? Well, as Fred puts it:

So, OK then. Phil Robertson is a creepy old man who preaches white supremacist myths defending segregation, preaches Bartonian lies endorsing sectarian government, endorses child marriage as a way of disallowing independent adulthood to women, refers to his own wife as “a vagina,” equates being gay with bestiality and terrorism, and says that all Muslims and “Shintos” are “under control of the Evil One.”

And Franklin Graham says it’s wrong for Christians to condemn those views. Instead, Graham says, it is our Christian duty to rally around those views because these are “the biblical truths we stand for.”

It's too bad that Robertson's anti-gay remarks grabbed all the spotlight, because the man is despicable on a number of fronts, and that racist stuff was much worse... And I think it's a fair bet that were Billy Graham the lion he was once, he'd not be allowing anybody sharing his name to defend those remarks. (He might just flat ignore them, yes, but he'd never defend them.)

(That link in the blockquote? It goes to nice set of Robertson quotes and even videos.)