You know Brittany Aldean’s whole transphobia scandal? That mess is not over.
She made a pretty mean-spirited joke, then doubled down with some explicitly bigoted posts.
Fellow Country singer Maren Morris joined countless others in calling her out. As a result, she’s not sure if she’s up for the CMAs.
As fun as calling Brittany “Insurrection Barbie” was, Maren knows that calling out dangerous misinformation is important. Especially now. Especially when the targets are children.
Maren Morris spoke to The Los Angeles Times last week ahead of performing at a concert.
Humble Quest has a nomination for Album of the Year at this year’s CMAs, which will take place in November.
She wanted to delve into her album and prestigious nomination … but there was a major elephant in the room to discuss.
Deranged Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson recently labeled Maren a “lunatic Country Music person.”
Yes, she has cleverly used that line to promote herself.
But she is well aware that a major white nationalism platform made her a target of their ire. And that might rule out attending the CMAs this year.
“I’ll wear that as a badge of honor,” Maren noted after fringe right bigots made her a target.
In fact, she has raised more than $150,000 for Trans Lifeline and GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program via T-shirt sales.
As for taking to Twitter to call out Brittany Aldean, well, someone had to say it.
“I hate feeling like I need to be the hall monitor of treating people like human beings in country music,” Maren admitted.
“It’s exhausting,” then she acknowledged. “But there’s a very insidious culture.”
A culture “of people feeling very comfortable being transphobic and homophobic and racist.”
Maren accurately characterized: “And that they can wrap it in a joke and no one will ever call them out for it.”
She lamented: “It just becomes normal for people to behave like that.”
“I don’t have feelings of kindness when it comes to humans being made fun of for questioning their identity,” Maren expressed. “Especially kids.”
“The whole ‘When they go low, we go high’ thing doesn’t work with these people,” Maren then noted.
“Any resistance movement is not done with kind words,” she affirmed. “And there’s a lot worse things I could’ve called her.”
“I think just the culture of misinformation that goes along with trans youth is where I was coming from,” she added.
“It’s not, “Oh, this is bad, and this is good, and we can agree to disagree.” No, we can’t,” Maren correctly noted.
“And,” she then said frankly to bigots, “you are being fed information that is false.”
Maren added: “And even though you’re not the one with the bullet in the gun, your words matter. Your disinformation matters.”
Maren observed: “I think there are people in country music that want it to be niche. They don’t want it to expand.”
She added: “They don’t care about it becoming more inclusive. It’s theirs, and everyone else is an other, or woke, or whatever.”
Maren then expressed: “That’s sad to me, because I feel like country music at its core is people’s real stories.”
