Reba McEntire is speaking out on an issue close to her heart, and she isn’t backing down. The 69-year-old is taking a stand for the LGBTQ community, offering not only her support but an impassioned plea for others to love without limits.
“I just went to my first gay wedding a couple of months ago in California, for Michael and Steven, my two great friends,” McEntire tells to PrideSource.com. “They’ve been together for 20 years! I thought that it was not fair, and I didn’t understand why they couldn’t get married. It wasn’t because they just wanted to get married. If one of them had gotten injured and gone to the hospital, the other one couldn’t make decisions for them. It’s very upsetting. It’s not only for convenience or for romantic reasons — it’s for practicality.”
McEntire’s daughter-in-law, Kelly Clarkson, recently wrote on Facebook that she wouldn’t care if any of her children were gay, and McEntire says that she wholeheartedly agrees and wishes that more parents would love their children unconditionally.
“What a child needs when they’re growing up is support and love, mainly love,” McEntire explains. “Love can go a long, long way whether they’re gay or not. All the troubles and the problems and the obstacles that they are going to face in their lives are going to be astronomical, especially in their very young, inexperienced minds. And if they do happen to be gay, that’s going to be a harder hurdle to get over. What a parent needs to do more than anything is jump in there with love and support. You made ’em. They’re a gift from God. Love ’em as they are.”
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The Oklahoma native also has strong feelings about artists like Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, Billy Gilman and Brandy Clark, who made the choice to publicly come out, regardless of the potential backlash from the country music community.
“It’s really, really sad what they’re living with before they decide to come out,” McEntire says. “And then why they decide to come out, and how they deal with it after they’ve come out — the pressure society puts upon them, their families and what they put upon them, whether they accept it or they don’t.
“You know, my new album is called Love Somebody … I wish it’d been called Love Everybody,” she adds. “You gotta love people for who they are. Accept them, and then go on with life.”
The “Going Out Like That” singer has had a 40-year career singing songs of empowerment — powerful anthems that stir up inner resolution. While she says she may not have personally lived the story in each song, she will always share them with her millions of fans.
“I’ve had people come up to me before saying, ‘You have no idea how so-and-so song changed my life. It helped me through a bad situation,'” McEntire explains. “God knows what he’s doing. He gives me the gut feeling to say yes to this song, yes to that song. And it might not have anything to do with my career, my lifestyle, but he’s got somebody down the road who needs to hear it.”
