Actor Sean Penn says he's surprised at
the “slow” progress of marriage equality.
Appearing on HuffPost Live, host
Roy Sekoff asked Penn whether he was surprised at “how quickly the
cultural zeitgeist has changed on gay marriage” since his 2009
Oscar-winning role in Milk.
“No,” Penn
answered. “I'm surprised at how slowly it's changed.”
“There are a lot of things that have
made extraordinary improvement and we all have to work hard to be
patient about how fast you can move with certain things relative to
the backlash it's going to take because the idealists will always
want to take two steps ahead.”
“As my attention was drawn more to it
as I went through my twenties and you have friends who are
experiencing the oppression of [anti-gay attitudes] and so on, and
the prejudice of it and the violence of it, the isolation of this…
your first thing is to say, this has to change yesterday. So I'm
glad it's changing, but not before people in this generation are
gonna have children that are gonna look back at them and say, 'My
parents were responsible for the suicide[s] of thirteen-year-old boys
and girls.'”
“And I think the sooner we change it,
the better our kids are gonna feel about us,” he added.