Actress Anne Hathaway, star of Love
and Other Drugs, is backing a campaign urging President Barack
Obama to support gay marriage.
Hathaway is among the celebrities
joining Freedom to Marry's Say I Do campaign, which launched
Monday with a letter to Obama asking the president for clarity on the
topic.
Also joining the campaign are actors
Jane Lynch, Eric McCormack, Martin Sheen, Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner
and Portia DeGeneres, musicians Melissa Etheridge, Mya and Rufus
Wainwright, playwright Tony Kusher and studio executive David Geffen.
Also included are social media titans Jack Dorsey, creator of
Twitter, and Chris Hughes, co-creator of Facebook, and NFL athletes
Brendon Ayanbadejo of the Baltimore Ravens and Scott Fujita of the
Cleveland Browns.
Openly gay chat show host Ellen
DeGeneres, who married her wife, Portia DeGeneres, formerly known as
Portia de Rossi, in California in 2008, is also backing the effort.
Lynch
married her girlfriend Lara Embry last year in Massachusetts.
Chris
Hughes is engaged to marry gay rights advocate Sean Eldridge.
McCormack asked Freedom to Marry
supporters to add
their names to the letter.
“I deeply love my wife Janet, and
Finnigan, our eight-year-old son, means everything to us,”
McCormack wrote in an email on Monday. “I simply want all of us to
be able to marry the person that we love. It's really as simple as
that. Whether gay or straight, we all need to stand together as one.
Join me by signing Freedom to Marry's letter to President Obama.”
The letter reads: “In law, in love,
in life, marriage says 'we are family' in a way that nothing else
does. Marriage is the coming together of two lives, marked by a
public promise of love and responsibility in front of friends and
family. And marriage brings not only public respect and personal
significance, but also a safety net of legal protections, rights, and
responsibilities for which there is no substitute.”
Obama has said he personally supports
government recognition of gay unions but not marriage, a
position he recently said he “wrestles” with.