Taylor Swift Kicks Off Pride Month With Urgent Letter to Tennessee Senator

On Friday night, the eve before Pride Month officially kicks off on Saturday, June 1, Taylor Swift posted she wrote to her Tennessee senator, Lamar Alexander, in hopes that he would consider increased protections for the LGBTQ community, and to urge her home state representative to support the Equality Act.

In her two-page typed letter she wrote, “I’m writing to you today in anticipation of a very important vote coming up,” the singer wrote. “As you know, the House just passed the Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace, in their homes and in schools. For American citizens to be denied jobs or housing based on who they love or how they identify, in my opinion is un-American and cruel.”

The 29-year-old pop star continued by writing that “the refusal in our own State’s legislature to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination has the serious potential to cripple us from bringing new jobs to Tennessee.”

“I personally reject this President’s stance that his administration ‘supports equal treatment of all,’ but that the Equality Act, ‘in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to determine parental and conscience rights.'” No, one cannot take the position that one supports a community, while condemning it in the next breath as going against “conscience” or “parental rights. That statement implies that there is something morally wrong with you being anything other than heterosexual or cisgender, which is an incredibly harmful letter to send to a nation full of healthy and loving families with same-sex, non-binary or transgender parents, sons or daughters.”

Swift closed out the letter with this final plea, “Please, please think about the lives you could change for the better if you were to vote to support the Equality Act in the Senate and prohibit this harsh and unfair discrimination.” She also posted the letter on her Instagram account, and just before her signature she added, “I for one would be immensely grateful.”

In addition to changing her main photo to that of a pastel rainbow, included in her tweet, a rainbow colored letter and a link for which her 83.4 million follows on Twitter, and 114 million fans on Instagram, can help by signing a petition for the Senate to support the Equality Act. The “ME!” singer also made a generous donation to national LGBTQ group, GLAAD.

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