Entertainment
You Need To Read Taylor Swift's Letter That Encourages Support For This Pivotal LGBTQ+ Bill
It's officially Pride Month, and Swifties are being called to action to support the LGBTQ+ community. To kick off Pride Month on June 1, Taylor Swift wrote a letter urging followers to support the Equality Act, and encouraged her fans to write their senators in order to ask them to support the bill as it makes its way to the Senate.
The singer shared a photo of the letter she wrote to Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander on her Instagram account, along with a note to her fans asking them to join her in supporting the passage of the Equality Act soon. "HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!" Swift began her caption. "While we have so much to celebrate, we also have a great distance to go before everyone in this country is truly treated equally."
She continued, "In excellent recent news, the House has passed the Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in their places of work, homes, schools, and other public accommodations. The next step is that the bill will go before the Senate. I’ve decided to kick off Pride Month by writing a letter to one of my senators to explain how strongly I feel that the Equality Act should be passed." Swift then asked her fans to write their own letters to their representatives, and even noted that she'll look through and read any letters they share via the hashtag "#lettertomysenator."
"Our country’s lack of protection for its own citizens ensures that LGBTQ people must live in fear that their lives could be turned upside down by an employer or landlord who is homophobic or transphobic," Swift wrote, adding, "The fact that, legally, some people are completely at the mercy of the hatred and bigotry of others is disgusting and unacceptable." The singer then pointed fans towards a petition that she had started to show support for the Equality Act, and show the Senate how important their constituents feel protections for LGBTQ+ Americans to be.
"Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally," Swift concluded her post, adding plenty of rainbow emojis, both as a tribute to the LGBTQ+ community and a nod to her new, candy-colored aesthetic.
Despite noting back in October 2018 that "in the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions," Swift has recently become much more outspoken about her political views and has openly talked about many issues that are important to her. In fact, the singer recently revealed that her upcoming seventh album will have "political undertones," marking a shift away from her previous position of keeping her views private.
According to Entertainment Tonight, who translated the interview from the German, site RTL, the singer went on to explain that she plans to continue encouraging her fans to make their own voices heard on important political issues. "I’m not planning to stop encouraging young people to vote and to try to get them to talk about what’s going on in our country. I think that’s one of the most important things I could do," she said.
In addition to being her most political album yet, Swift also teased that her next album will be her most honest and personal. While speaking with Apple Music Beats 1 host Zane Lowe back in April, the singer drew a comparison between reputation and her upcoming release. Describing the new record as "much more playful and actually inward facing," Swift continued, "Like, when you get into this album, it’s much more about me as a person — no pun intended with the song title. But it’s kind of taking those walls, taking that bunker down from around you that I felt like I had to put up."
At this point in her career, it seems as if Swift is comfortable with sharing who she really is and what she believes and values in this world — and between her activism on social media and her new "political" album, it looks like she's not going to hide that part of herself away any longer.