Franklin Graham: Hated humanitarian

By John Aman

Doctors and nurses put their lives at risk in March to serve COVID-19 patients in a 68-bed emergency field hospital set up in New York's Central Park. They did so as a mission of mercy – offering expert treatment to the sick and suffering, and showing the Gospel in action.

But to New York's wary and unsmiling guardians of "tolerance," it was hate in action.

Alarmed, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was "going to send people over from [my] office to monitor" the hospital.

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson attacked the mercy mission, calling it an "affront to our values of inclusion" and "painful for all New Yorkers who care deeply about the LGBTQ community."

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A New York state senator fumed that the city was "in the unfortunate position of having to accept charity from bigots like Franklin Graham."

Graham leads Samaritan's Purse, which brought the hospital to New York. His relief organization, he insisted, serves "everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation. … We don't discriminate. Period."

Not good enough.

Graham's indelible crime is that he rejects same-sex "marriage" and is vocal about it. That makes him the "notoriously bigoted, hate-spewing Franklin Graham," as Speaker Johnson, uh, spewed.

And for that reason, Johnson announced May 1 he wants to kick Samaritan's Purse out of the Big Apple. Actually, he's a little late. With the crisis abating, the temporary hospital will be gone by mid-May.

Johnson will have to be satisfied with kicking them as they go. And the reason? As Johnson put it, "Hate has no place in our beautiful city."

Of course.

Franklin's father, the late Billy Graham, was one of America's most admired men for decades. Billy, like Franklin, believed in biblical marriage – one man and one woman for life. But while Billy was revered, Franklin is despised – a stunning turnaround that took place in less than 10 years.

What happened? Ask "The Simpsons'" Ned Flanders. Homer's honest, sincere, pious and irritatingly perfect neighbor has been called America's best-known evangelical. The epitome of evangelical nice when he arrived in Homer's neighborhood in 1989, Flanders' creators later gave him a personality makeover, morphing him from milquetoast to monster.

Nice-guy Ned became an intolerant bigot in a transformation so dramatic that Hollywood took notice and titled such extreme character alterations "Flanderization."

And now life is imitating art. The left has "Flanderized" Franklin Graham, turning a humanitarian into a hater. Never mind that he has dedicated his life to helping others and that his organization, Samaritan's Purse, feeds, heals and houses people of all stripes in dire need across the world.

That's irrelevant. Graham believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. That makes him a bigot – along with anyone else who upholds biblical marriage.

It's beyond ironic and utter fiction – a cartoon just like "The Simpsons." For proof, follow the money. Typically, "haters" don't give away their wealth to help others. But scholar Arthur Brooks ran the numbers and concluded in his book, "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism," that religious conservatives are much more generous than secular liberals.

And who are "religious conservatives"? Well, in a nation where three-quarters of the population claim to be Christian, that term equates, for the most part, to Christian conservatives – aka the "haters."

But that's not all. Brooks also presented data showing that givers – of which Christian conservatives constitute a sizable portion – "are also more sympathetic and tolerant than nongivers." Givers, Brooks said, "express less negative prejudice than nongivers toward African Americans, whites, Latinos, and Asians" – and many more. Boom!

So who are the real haters?

Well, we all know about white supremacists – people who harbor racist, anti-Semitic attitudes and sometimes act them out. They represent a real pathology in American life. But that's on the margins.

What's not is the bristling animosity bubbling up on the left. The Southern Poverty Law Center and others caricature Christians as haters – a lie that sparked domestic terrorism against the Family Research Council. But actual malice is alive and well on the left. A few examples:

• Joy Behar, host of ABC's "The View," mocked Christian prayer as "mental illness."
• Alleged comedian Kathy Griffin brandished the faux bloody severed head of Donald Trump.
• Maxine Waters told people to confront and harass members of the Trump administration.
• And self-proclaimed anti-fascist protesters, dubbed "antifa," practice violence. These left-wing goons have thrown glass bottles and bricks at police, engaged in hand-to-hand combat in street fights and set fires. The Southern Poverty Law Center says they're not a hate group.

Even more unsettling is the startling animosity well-educated liberals harbor for conservative Christians. Researchers George Yancey and David A. Williamson sent a questionnaire on the Christian right to some 3,500 progressive Americans, people with advanced degrees who "hold relatively high levels of social power."

A sizeable minority responded with hair-curling words of intense dislike for conservative Christians:

• "I wish we could start feeding them to lions again, or burn them at the stake." (Male, aged 36-45 with doctorate)
• "They should be eradicated without hesitation or remorse." (Female, aged 66-75 with master's degree)
• "The only good Christian is a dead Christian." (Male, aged 36-45 with doctorate)
• "I want them all to die in a fire." (Male, aged 26-35 with doctorate)
• "Would like to give them all a frontal lobotomy." (Male, over 75 with master's degree)
• "A tortuous death would be too good for them." (Male, aged 36-45 with bachelor's degree)
• "I would be in favor of establishing a state for them. … If not then sterilize them so they can't breed more." (Male, aged 46-55 with master's degree)

You get the idea. Poisonous hate, blatant bigotry, raw scorn pouring out of the mind and heart of educated "progressives" – people wielding the levers of power in American society.

It's worth noticing, too, that the folks over at cafepress.com will happily sell you T-shirts, coffee cups, bumper stickers, even a cap – all emblazoned with "So many Christians, so few lions."

Just satire, you may say. But you won't find T-shirts blaring, "So many Jews, so few ovens" or the equally vicious, "So many blacks, so few Ku Klux Klan members."

That's not socially acceptable. But attacking Christians – even humanitarians like Franklin Graham – now is. And those who mount this shocking assault are the very same people who lecture us against hate. After all, "Hate has no place. …"

John Aman is Director of Communications at D. James Kennedy Ministries and the author of "Demanding Tolerance: Losing our Freedom to Disagree," available at DJKM.org.