Don Lemon returned to CNN on Tuesday to promote his new book, I Once Was Lost, but despite the obvious allusion to “Amazing Grace,” Lemon insisted on Inside Politics that today’s white Evangelicals are no different than the slave owners of previous eras who twisted the Bible for their own purposes.
What made Lemon’s comparison even more outrageous is that he and host Dana Bash were discussing why Donald Trump is appealing to black men with ads about Kamala Harris being in favor of taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for prisoners. As Bash switched topics to the book, Lemon added, “The black community is also very conservative, especially when it comes to LGBTQ issues.”
Bash proceeded to read from the book, “So, you just lead right into the first quote I want to use from your book, I One Was Lost, which is just a terrific book. You write, ‘As a gay black boy in the Deep South attending Baptist churches and Catholic school, I heard homosexuality defined as an ‘abomination’... I prayed as hard as a child could pray: Please, Lord, make me not be gay.’ That's tough.”
She then urged him to “connect what you just said before to this.”
Lemon claimed, “It's tough because people automatically think that African Americans are liberal, right? And many times they can be socially conservative, right? And accepting in ways that are not seen in public.”
He continued:
I think that it's tough because, and it's not just the African-American community, because you can have in the larger culture, white folks, you know, denigrate LGBTQ community, but as a child growing up because of how people and especially Evangelicals, which is why I wrote the book, how they take scripture and the Bible out of context and they interpret that scripture in ways that they want to, they used the same scripture to subjugate women. They used the same scripture to enslave people of color, and so, then they use the same scripture to denigrate the LGBTQ community, to denigrate gay people, and so growing up, it was tough.
Lemon acknowledged that conservative sexual ethics are prevalent in Catholicism and African American circles as well, but the fact that such a consensus exists doesn’t matter to him. Only the ability to attack Evangelical conservatives matters.
As it was, Lemon added, “So, I thought having a belief in God, especially when I was going to be born again, right, from being baptized, that I could pray it away. It was magical thinking. And then the older you get and you start to think critically and you start to realize around the time Santa Claus and the whole realization, I won't say here, because people may be watching, then you realize that that's actually not what faith in God’s all about.”
What is faith in God really about? Lemon didn’t say, but to any kids out there who happened to stumble across the noon hour of CNN, ignore Don Lemon and rest assured that Santa Claus is real.
Here is a transcript for the October 15 show:
CNN Inside Politics with Dana Bash
10/15/2024
12:40 AM ET
DANA BASH: I want to talk a little bit about your book—
DON LEMON: The black community is also very conservative, especially when it comes to LGBTQ issues.
BASH: — Well, that's, okay, so, you just lead right into the first quote I want to use from your book, I One Was Lost, which is just a terrific book. You write, “As a gay black boy in the Deep South attending Baptist churches and Catholic school, I heard homosexuality defined as an ‘abomination’… I prayed as hard as a child could pray: Please, Lord, make me not be gay.”
LEMON: I did.
BASH: That's tough.
LEMON: It is tough.
BASH: But it, connect what you just said before to this.
LEMON: It's tough because people automatically think that African Americans are liberal, right? And many times they can be socially conservative, right? And accepting in ways that are not seen in public. But I think that it's tough because, and it's not just the African-American community, because you can have in the larger culture, white folks, you know, denigrate LGBTQ community, but as a child growing up because of how people and especially Evangelicals, which is why I wrote the book, how they take scripture and the Bible out of context and they interpret that scripture in ways that they want to, they used the same scripture to subjugate women.
They used the same scripture to enslave people of color, and so, then they use the same scripture to denigrate the LGBTQ community, to denigrate gay people, and so growing up, it was tough. So, I thought having a belief in God especially when I was going to be born again, right, from being baptized, that I could pray it away. It was magical thinking.
And then the older you get and you start to think critically and you start to realize around the time Santa Claus and the whole realization, I won't say here, because people may be watching, then you realize that that's actually not what faith in God’s all about.
