Maren Morris.Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty
Maren Morrisis embracing being a “lunatic country music person,” and encouraging her fans to be one, too — just in time for Halloween.
The country star, 32, tweeted an image of a photoshopped Spirit Halloween costume package with the label “lunatic country music person,” and a picture of her on the front. Of course, the costume isn’t real and is just Morris' way of playing along with the internet’s most-recent meme craze, but the details are quite impressive.
“I didn’t commission this but I do acknowledge it,” she wrote. “Happy Halloween, lunatics.”
The faux costume, which is notably “child size” — Morris is 5'1" — boasts the inclusion of pieces like a tambourine, inclusive fans, apickleball paddle, a wig, and “beef with transphobes,” with a “tall guy not included.” (Her husband and the subject of her song “Tall Guys,“Ryan Hurd, is 6'3”.) The meme nods to Morris’public feud with Brittany Kerr Aldean, the wife of fellow country starJason Aldean, Her September interview with Fox News' Tucker Carlson inspired the conservative pundit to use the phrase against Morris.
Their back-and-forth began when Brittany, 34, made a transphobic comment in an Instagram video amid the ongoing debate and efforts torestrict access to gender-affirming care. At the time, Aldean thanked her “parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase,” which Morris seemingly responded to on Twitter, telling her to “sell your clip-ins and zip it” and calling her an “Insurrection Barbie.”
After Aldean flocked to Carlson, Morrisstuck the phrase on T-shirtsand sold them to fans, when she raised over $150,000 for the Trans Lifeline and GLAAD’s Transgender Media Program.
“I was like, ‘Oh, here we go.’ But I thought, ‘You know what? This would be really funny on a T-shirt: ‘Lunatic country music person,'” Morris later told theLA Times. “Thank you, Tucker. Was it funny? Sure. But if we can twist it into a charitable cause, let’s do it. Then it just exploded.”
The “lunatic” name is now a “badge of honor” to the country star, who told theTimesthat she doesn’t have any “feelings of kindness when it comes to humans being made fun of for questioning their identity, especially kids.”
“I hate feeling like I need to be the hall monitor of treating people like human beings in country music,” Morris said. “It’s exhausting. But there’s a very insidious culture of people feeling very comfortable being transphobic and homophobic and racist, and that they can wrap it in a joke and no one will ever call them out for it. It just becomes normal for people to behave like that.”
Theo Wargo/Getty
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At least 13 U.S. states have signed anti-LGBTQ legislation into law, and another 23 states have introduced such bills in 2022 alone, according toHRC, with many of those laws targeting transgender youth and gender-affirming care.
PresidentJoe Bidenrecentlypledged his support to trans citizensduring Transgender Day of Visibility in March, and he’s continued to urge Congress topass the long-overdue Equality Act.
source: people.com
