Profile
Photos
Comments
Monday, 24 January 2011 12:23
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Sir Elton John is ``fed up'' with being a treated like a ``second-class citizen'' in the U.S.
That's why the 63-year-old gay singer said he took a stand last week
during a performance at a private Beverly Hills fundraiser for the
ongoing legal challenge to California's gay marriage ban. The outspoken
British piano man, who became a parent to a baby boy on Christmas Day
with partner David Furnish, added that ``as I get older, I get more
angry about it.''
``In this country, we need more dialogue,'' he said during an
interview Friday. ``We don't need any more stone throwing. We don't need
any more vitriol. We need people to say, 'OK. I'm straight. You're gay.
Let's get along. I'm Republican. You're Democratic. Let's work
together.' I'm sick and tired of people being hateful to each other in
this country.''
John disappointed some gay rights activists after California's
Proposition 8 referendum measure banning gay marriage passed in 2008
when he said he had no desire to get married and was satisfied with his
civil partnership in England. He sang a different tune Wednesday when he
praised the effort to overturn Proposition 8 and promised to do
everything he could to support it, even though he is British.
The couple's son, Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, was born in
California through a surrogate mother. John said he was disappointed
that members of the Church of England questioned his parenthood in the
days following his son's birth. He insisted that he's not against
religion and that ``Jesus was a wonderful, compassionate man, who
forgave on the cross.''
``Everyone is entitled to have their own beliefs and their own
spirituality,'' said John. ``The big difference is that the dogma of the
church can be so hateful and divisive. It's stuck in the Stone Age. We
don't live in the Stone Age anymore. The church is losing people left,
right and center because people are fed up with the rhetoric that
they're giving them.''
