Taylor Swift wants to know why the White House isn’t doing more when it comes to equality. At the MTV Video Music Awards Monday night where she won Video of the Year for ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ a song that promotes LGBTQ rights, she said:
“In this video, several points were made, so you voting for this video means that you want a world where we’re all treated equally under the law, regardless of who we love, regardless of how we identify.
At the end of this video, there was a petition, and there still is a petition, for the Equality Act, which basically just says we all deserve equal rights under the law. And I want to thank everyone who signed that petition because it now has half a million signatures — which is five times the amount that it would need to warrant a response from the White House.”
The petition, which is at just over 500,000 and still climbing thanks to the VMAs bump, urges the U.S. Senate to pass the Equality Act, which has already passed the House. The Act would essentially bring federal anti-discrimination laws in line with current state legislation, banning discrimination “on the basis of the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition of an individual, as well as because of sex-based stereotypes.”
Watch the full speech above.