(screen cap from the “Follow Your Arrow” music video, posted below)
Kacey Musgraves is one of the coolest, most promising up-and-coming country singers in Nashville, and in her music and in interviews, she’s been speaking out in support of things like equality and acceptance. Consider her single, “Follow Your Arrow”:
In it she discusses a few controversial topics, including one mainstream country rarely — if ever — tackles: homosexuality. “Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into,” she sings.
“Well I hope it gets attention because I think it’s definitely time for those issues to be accepted in country music — I mean it’s 2013,” she said. “Regardless of your political beliefs, everybody should be able to love who they want to love and live how they want to live. We’re all driven by the same emotions; we all want to be loved and want to feel the same things. So, hopefully people will put aside their personal, political agenda and just agree with that fact.”
In case you don’t follow country, it should be noted that Kacey won both best country song and album at the Grammys this year, and she also won album of the year at the ACM awards. We are not dealing with an outlier here, but rather somebody who is at the very center of mainstream, commercial country music. Here’s that song, so you can enjoy it, and then we will look at what wingnut Kevin Swanson had to say about this:
Say what you think
Love who you love
‘Cause you just get so many trips ’round the sun…
Oh, I just like her.
So, now that we’re all familiar with the source material, let’s see what anti-gay talk show host Kevin Swanson thinks about it:
Kevin Swanson is not happy that country singer Kacey Musgraves won album of the year at the 2014 ACM Awards, warning that the singer is pushing the destruction of America and causing demons to dance in its ashes.
Swanson said on his April 10 radio program that if Musgraves had performed her song “Follow Your Arrow” any time between the 1880s and the 1960s, it would have prompted calls for her to be killed: “Let me say this, if she had sang [sic] that thing in a country bar in the 1920s or 1880s in Denver, Colorado, somebody would’ve called for a rope, ‘Get a rope!’ You know what would have happened, she would not have made it out of town in the 1880s, 1920s, 1940s or 1960s.”
“But things have changed, friends,” he lamented.
He is so sad. Kevin really likes country music, and he is coming to grips with the fact that every area of society is leaving wingnuts behind. Listen to him reminiscing about the olden timey days when Kacey Musgrave might have been killed for singing a song supporting people being able to love who they love:
Also, somehow Kacey Musgraves is part of an anti-Christian conspiracy to turn the United States into Sodom, and at the forefront of the “dismantling of the Christian faith in the heartland”:
I’m sure this is all news to Kacey, but I fully support Kevin’s right to say things like this, as it helps our side so, so much. I’d be curious to know what he thinks about the fact that the lead singer of one of the most successful Contemporary Christian bands of the last twenty years just came out in support of marriage equality.
