Franklin Graham, Christian leader and son of 1980’s TV evangelist Billy Graham, has urged the Christian community to divest from companies that support LGBT rights.
Apparently, it started when Graham saw Wells Fargo bank—where his church keeps its money—use a same-sex couple in an ad, which made Graham feel like ‘moral decay’ was being crammed down his throat.
Graham said in the post that he was removing the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s account from Wells Fargo and switching banks.
If Graham is serious about divesting from all LGBT-friendly companies, he may need to look into conservative Christian credit unions instead of banks. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index, the following banks and financial companies received perfect scores when it came to supporting LGBT employees in the workplace and beyond: American Express, Ameriprise, Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase… and the list goes on. Basically, all of the most prevalent financial companies in the U.S. are LGBT-friendly.
If Graham truly wants to divest from LGBT-friendly companies and let his evangelical dollars do the talking, in fact, he’d not only need to pull out from almost all U.S. banks, loans, and credit cards; he’d also need to stop using Facebook. The very social platform Graham used to announce his disgust with LGBT-friendly companies is, well, an LGBT-friendly company.
Facebook also received a perfect ‘100’ score on the HRC equality index based on its engagement with and marketing to the LGBT community, its non-discrimination policies regarding sexual orientation and gender identity, benefit coverage for same-sex partners, coverage of transgender health and surgery procedures, diversity council, and its internal LGBT employee group Pride@Facebook.
Also, Graham says he loves his Fitbit—which was apparently sent by God himself to track our footsteps. Fitbit also happens to be the product of a San Francisco-based company, which in Graham’s worldview basically means the little activity trackers are fueled by the lubrication of Sodomites and the throbbing disco tracks of the Devil’s neighborhood, The Castro.
So far, Christians don’t seem to be catching on to any kind of massive nationwide boycott of top corporations. But one user left a comment on Graham’s post that did point him towards a particularly evangelical-friendly item for sale: the Jesus Slingshot. According to Dangerous Minds, the Jesus Slingshot allows Christians to ‘cast that first stone.’ You know, for he who is without sin and stuff.
Photo via Paul Walsh/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)