| Brad Pitt: Straight people against gay marriage take their rights for granted

thanks Brad and Angelina for your support

PageOneQ | Brad Pitt: Straight people against gay marriage take their rights for granted

by Nick Cargo

"People who are against gay marriage do not understand the very freedoms that they themselves are enjoying," screen star Brad Pitt told W Magazine in an interview running in its February issue.

Pitt, whose causes include building homes for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, has also been an ally for marriage equality; he and fiancée Angelina Jolie refuse to marry until their gay and lesbian counterparts can do the same, he told Esquire in a September 2008 interview. The couple's charitable foundation, founded in 2006, also announced a $2 million donation to build a clinic in Ethiopia to treat children living with HIV.

That same month, Pitt contributed $100,000 to the "No on 8" campaign in opposition to California's Proposition 8, which is currently the subject of a high court challenge. The California Supreme Court affirmed the equal constitutional right to marry a person of the same sex in May 2008, voiding the 2000 gay marriage ban written into state statute. Proposition 8, passed in November 2008 after about 18,000 same-sex couples legally married, would revise the state's constitution to explicitly recognize heterosexual marriages, with language identical to the statute already ruled unconstitutional, if it survives the legal challenge.

"What if someone said, ‘Sorry, no Christianity here? No Judaism. Certainly no Mormons.’ No one would stand for that," Pitt added, "and I wouldn’t allow anyone to say that either. I’d fight them in the same way."