Former President Jimmy Carter sounds more like a Republican than a Democrat on same-sex marriage these days:
Former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview published Sunday that decisions on same-sex marriage should be left up to the states.
“I don’t think that the government ought to ever tell the church to marry people, if the church doesn’t want to. I’m a Baptist and the congregation of our church will decide whether we have a man or a woman as pastor, and whether we’ll marry gay people or not,” Carter, the first elected evangelical Christian president, told WFAA-TV.
When asked if he saw same-sex marriage being established nationwide, Carter said, “I’m kind of inclined to let the states decide individually.”
“As you see more and more states are deciding on gay marriage every year. If Texas doesn’t want to have gay marriage, then I think that’s a right for Texas people to decide,” Carter said.
His remarks are a departure from the comments he made last summer, when he said the Supreme Court should have established same-sex marriage across all states.
“It should be a right nationwide … it’s coming,” Carter told CNN in June 2013.
Carter’s not so subtle change on this issue may be due to the fact that his Grandson Jason Carter is locked in a tight election race against Georgia’s Republican Nathan Deal. While the younger Carter has said that he supports marriage equality, he has remained rather mum on the issue during the campaign and hasn’t said exactly if he believes that marriage equality should be the rule nationwide or whether he supports making it legal in Georgia via legislation if the people support it. Whatever the case may be, it somewhat amuses me that former President Carter is apparently to the right of Dick Cheney and sitting Republican Senators like Ohio’s Rob Portman on this issue.
