Kacey Musgraves is facing backlash from some fans after she showed support for immigrant families during a birthday performance.
The Grammy-winning country singer celebrated her 38th birthday on Friday by marking the opening night of her Middle of Nowhere tour in Chicago. At one point during the performance, she paused the show and urged the audience to donate to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights as her “birthday wish.”
“It’s a wonderful organization, and they help give aid — legal aid — and money to children whose parents have been deported unfairly,” Musgraves said on stage. “It’s not a political thing. It’s just, these kids need help.”
She continued: “They have no guidance and no way to get through this thing without their home base or their parents. So anyway, 50 cents, whatever the hell, I don’t know, whatever you want to do, but that would mean a lot to me. If you don’t want to, that’s totally fine too.”
The plea was met with applause and cheers from her crowd at the United Center. However, once videos of the moment started circulating online, conservative political commentators were quick to unleash their wrath on the “Follow Your Arrow” singer.
And it sounds like you’re one of them. But here I am engaging with you. Trying to remind you that you can be better, that you can be the bigger person, that you have a responsibility to be change you want to see.
I am kind to all animals, even small ones. They are not people, or even human, but that doesn’t matter.
Personhood is the instantiation of certain transcendental values. Many (if not most) humans in our 200k year history have not been people capable of understanding important things or acting in moral ways. So what? Bears aren’t people either and it doesn’t stop me from being nice to them. Pretending otherwise out of some misplaced sense of inclusivity doesn’t make me a “better” person, as you said — it makes me wrong.
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By the way, the argument you’re making is a speciesist one, as if all Homo sapiens share a special trait that other animals don’t and denying this fact is “dehumanizing,” whatever that means.
This is incorrect. All animals, including humans, fall somewhere on a spectrum: for kindness, for intelligence, for their ability to love, etc. Some combination of these traits is called “personhood” and grants you special responsibilities and considerations — for example, my willingness to take your ethical opinions seriously, as I’m doing now, for you.