Aside from her music, iconic singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge’s political views on issues like the LGBT, politics, and other different causes get a lot of mileage.
This is because the outspoken and very articulate Melissa speaks her mind. She also writes songs about the things that she strongly believes in.
For example, she wrote the song “I Need to Wake Up” for the environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (for which she won an Oscar), as well as “Pulse” after the gay bar shooting in Orlando.
Aside from being a cancer survivor and advocating the use of medical marijuana, she’s also written eloquently about her views in Huffington Post and Rolling Stone.
Sourcing Melissa Etheridge’s political views
Ironically, Melissa doesn’t see herself as a political activist but rather as someone who is concerned about the truth of the world.
“Just by saying that I am in favor of something, I automatically become an activist,” she once said in an interview with the Washington Times.
In another interview, she said, “The thing that I keep finding is that each time I just speak the truth, it becomes political. I live in a world where it’s courageous and crazy to speak the truth. What kind of funny world is that?”
A retrospective view on same-sex marriage
When the Supreme Court ruled favorably for same-sex marriage in 2015, Melissa was ecstatic– but she had seen it coming.
“Over the years I’ve managed to stay very positive about this issue. I knew it would happen. I really believed it was the time. I just couldn’t see us as a society going backwards,” she wrote in Rolling Stone.
“In the end, it came down to civil rights, to human rights,” she said.
Melissa Etheridge’s political views on the 2016 polls
For the 2016 elections, Melissa has given her support to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton– especially in light of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s anti-LGBT stance.
“I think our history books will show us that this was when a great shift happened in our country and in our world where fear of women, fear of weakness, fear of different religion, fear of different color, different race– all these fears that we finally had to let go of and say, OK, our diversity makes us strong and a woman can absolutely lead us,” Melissa said in an interview with Maine Today.
“This woman has more experience than anybody running for president has had in a long time. She’s been senator. She’s been secretary of state, for god’s sake. It just proves that a woman has to do 10 times as much as a man does to be taken seriously,” she added.
Looking toward LGBT’s next battles
After the legal battles over same-sex marriage, Melissa had also foreseen the issues surrounding transgender issues
In fact, she proved to be prescient in the wake of the bathroom bills that targeted transgenders.
Writing in Rolling Stone in 2015, she said, “The next battle in the movement will involve transgender issues. It will involve our whole society understanding the balance of male and female inside all of us.”
“There’s no way to put gender and gender roles in a box anymore. I think what we see now that ten years in the future will look very different,” she said.
For more about Melissa’s political views, check out her video interview below with NBC News on Donald Trump. For more about her upcoming album, you can find information in the current issue of Lesbian News.
