While attending the Republican National Convention this week, actor Stephen Baldwin offered up some eyebrow-raising views on same-sex marriage.
The 50-year-old “Usual Suspects” star told Katie Couric in a July 19 Yahoo! News interview that his stance on marriage equality was a bit of a “Jedi mind trick.” Same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, he said, if they started their own churches and institutions that give them that right.
“I think anybody should be free to do whatever they want, but they shouldn’t ask other people to compromise what they believe in order to do so,” he said. “I don’t think there should be anything wrong with that at all.”
When Couric pressed him further, Baldwin noted that some of his “best friends in the world are gay folks,” before attempting a clarification that somehow wound up making his stance more convoluted than it had been previously.
“If they believe that they should have the right to have that kind of a union, and they believe that they should have the rights that come along with that,” he said, “they shouldn’t ask, for instance, the Catholic church to change its doctrine to accommodate that.”
Baldwin, who is an evangelical Christian and has formally endorsed Donald Trump for president, has taken a bizarre stance on marriage equality before. In a 2012 chat with Rosie O’Donnell, the actor said same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, but only “in their world.”
That same year, Baldwin jumped to the defense of “Growing Pains” star Kirk Cameron, who has been an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage. “I think it’s important to stand up and voice what he believes in,” Baldwin said. “According to the Christian faith, the nuclear family is the origin of what this country was founded on.”
Unfortunately, Stephen, this separate-but-equal argument does not compute.
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