I’m not supporting Tom Hanks in any way, but I am assuming that what he meant was that the ideas and ideals behind Prop 8 are what are un-American — not that giving money to a cause or political fund (even a conservative one) is un-American.
He's since apologized, but he said that he viewed it as discriminatory to bar homosexuals from marrying, and he still does.
I always liked Tom Hanks, but you remember what Ann Coulter wrote in “Godless” — that liberalism had become a religion, and one of the dogmas of this religion is that people are born gay. To many people on the left, homosexuality is not a behavior but an innate identity. So to people who believe this, it's discriminatory to bar people from marrying others of the same sex.
The problem with this, of course, is that sexuality is not that simple, and most scientists believe that psychological and cultural factors shape people sexually, as well as biological factors. Most people on the left seem not to understand this and equate sexuality to race or gender, which is not correct. (Read what Camille Paglia has to say about this in the most recent edition of salon.com.)
Remember, Hanks was in “Philadelphia,” and this probably influenced his politics.
“I’m not supporting Tom Hanks in any way, but I am assuming that what he meant was that the ideas and ideals behind Prop 8 are what are un-American — not that giving money to a cause or political fund (even a conservative one) is un-American.”
So even if we give Tom benefit of doubt, and say that the idea of defining marriage as one man and one woman is un-American, that’s still hard to take. If the ideals behind Prop. 8, that we should define marriage, is somehow un-American to the Hollywood Idiots, I don’t know what to tell anybody.