Country music star Chely Wright says
she is outraged over the bullying of gay teens and the inequities
LGBT people face.
The 40-year-old singer-songwriter came
out lesbian in an interview with People magazine last year.
In that interview, Wright called her coming out “magical” and
revealed that she once believed she could alter her sexual
orientation by praying it away.
Wright continued to talk about her
coming out in her memoir Like Me: Confessions of a Country Singer
and in subsequent interviews. Her high-profile coming out is the
subject of the documentary Wish Me Away.
During an in-depth interview on the PBS
series OVERHEARD, Wright told host Evan Smith that much of the
anti-gay rhetoric is being fueled by churches.
“One of the symptoms of being human
is that fear eclipses hope. And I suffer from it as well,” she
said in an attempt to explain anti-gay discrimination. “But I'm
personally outraged.”
“I am a Christian, but many of our
churches are fueling this fire. And we as a Christian world, a
Christian nation, you know, by and large, we somehow abandon all good
thinking and walk like a bunch of zombies when we are told by
somebody behind a pulpit what to do, think, say, or feel.”
“It breaks my heart. In all that
we've seen in the past year with suicides and beatings of young gay
people – and older gay people, as well – those of us in the LGBT
community know that this is not new.”
Wright added that for every positive It
Gets Better video, opponents raise their voices even louder. (The
video is embedded in the right panel of this page.)