Out of Touch 

Editor:

In his April 25 Week in Weed column ("A Match Made in Heaven: The CBD Burger and the Evangelist Editor"), Thadeus Greenson voiced that he felt someone who is an evangelist couldn't be an unbiased reporter on marijuana for the LA Weekly.  Well, I feel the same way about the evangelist Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son and a good friend of Donald Trump's, when he speaks as a supposed political commentator rather than the evangelical spokesperson he is.

Graham says he has a problem with presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg because he campaigns openly as a practicing Episcopalian who also happens to be gay and married to his partner Chasten Glezman. Graham thinks Buttigieg should repent for what he sees as the sin of being gay, and that his religion and sexuality should not be politicized. Graham's opinion may be shared by the mostly conservative evangelicals he represents but I think it would not be so for the general population.

The acceptance of the rights of the LGBTQ community have been steadily on the increase. A national poll from February shows that 68 percent of respondents would be comfortable or enthusiastic about a gay or lesbian candidate while only 54 percent would feel the same about an evangelical.

One need only harken back to Catholic Jack Kennedy or black Barack Obama to find two candidates who managed to overcome what many thought were fatal handicaps. And don't forgot, if it weren't for our electoral college system, we would have had our first female president by now.

So I would say to Franklin Graham that he has a right to his own opinion as an evangelical spokesperson but, as a political commentator, most of us would not see Buttigieg's gayness in the condemning Biblical terms he does.

Sherman Schapiro, Blue Lake