At a rally in Phoenix last night, as President Trump spent more than an hour railing against the media, lying about his response to deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, complaining about activists removing Confederate monuments who want to “take away our culture,” and defending birther sheriff Joe Arpaio, he got some help from two of his allies on the Religious Right, Alveda King and Franklin Graham.
King and Graham led the crowd in Phoenix in opening prayers, offering vague denunciations of “racial division” without addressing the fact that the president himself has been thrilling white supremacists with his “both sides” response to Charlottesville.
King, an anti-abortion activist and niece of Martin Luther King Jr., said that the U.S., as well as embracing “racial division leading to the injustice of racism,” has fallen to the sins of “reproductive rights” and “humanism.”
“We have slaughtered our weakest in the womb, the poor, the elderly and infirm in the name of reproductive rights and social justice,” she said. “We have embraced inhumanity to humankind in the name of humanism.”
King also offered a strange take on the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments, suggesting that both erecting and removing those monuments is idol-worship: “In constructing and destroying manmade statues in the name of memorials, we have worshipped idols and are reaping the bitter grapes of wrath today.”
Graham, following King, seemed unaware of the record of the president he was introducing, asking God to shut the mouths of “those in this country who want to divide, who want to preach hate,” lamenting that the U.S. has “flaunted sexual immorality to the world” and saying that the day foreseen in the Bible has come “when the truth would become a lie and lies would become truth.”
