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LGBT

UPDATED: Brad Pitt’s Mother DID Write Anti-Gay Letter

By Zack Ford on Jul 5, 2012 at 1:30 pm

UPDATE (4:30 PM): The Springfield News-Leader has changed its story again, including deleting the Opinion Page editor’s previous comment. According to a new editorial note posted on the letter:

To clear up earlier confusion, the News-Leader has verified the letter writer is the mother of actor Brad Pitt and local businessman Doug Pitt.

It’s entirely unclear what the paper confirmed to ThinkProgress earlier, nor how exactly it later confirmed that it was not the same Jane Pitt, only to now verify that it is the same Jane Pitt. We regret the confusion caused by the News-Leader’s mixed messages.

UPDATE (2:15 PM): Despite the Springfield News-Leader’s earlier confirmation to ThinkProgress that Brad Pitt’s mother had, in fact, composed the letter attacking President Obama and same-sex marriage (see below), the newspaper’s opinion-page editor has now clarified that it was written by a different Jane Pitt who does not have a familial connection to the famous actor. We regret the error.

The actor Brad Pitt has long supported the LGBT community, reiterating as recently as six weeks ago that he and Angelina Jolie still haven’t set a date for their wedding because they’re “still hoping for marriage equality in the States” before they do. His family, however, still lives in Springfield, Missouri and does not share his progressive values. In a letter to the Springfield News-Leader, his mother Jane Pitt wrote that as a non-Mormon Christian, she is still willing to support Mitt Romney for President because he is anti-choice and anti-marriage equality:

I think any Christian should spend much time in prayer before refusing to vote for a family man with high morals, business experience, who is against abortion, and shares Christian conviction concerning homosexuality just because he is a Mormon.

Any Christian who does not vote or writes in a name is casting a vote for Romney’s opponent, Barack Hussein Obama — a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.

The News-Leader has confirmed to ThinkProgress the authenticity of Pitt’s letter and her identity.

AJ Bockelman, executive director of LGBT advocacy group PROMO, responded that, “It’s great that Brad Pitt has been able to learn and grow from his experiences once he left the area, but for folks still living in Southwest Missouri, this sends a message that we still must do more to create acceptance for LGBT people and their families.”

NEWS FLASH

WATCH: Star-Studded Performance Of Proposition 8 Play Now On YouTube | If you missed Saturday night’s live performance of “8,” Dustin Lance Black’s play based on the transcripts of the Proposition 8 trial, it is now available online. Celebrities like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jane Lynch, and Martin Sheen brought to life the trial’s powerful arguments for equality, the ineptitude of those who oppose same-sex marriage, and the emotional impact on the plaintiffs’ families. Given Prop 8′s proponents fought so hard to prevent public distribution of the videos of the proceedings, this reading is a must-watch and must-share glimpse into what actually transpired:

Alyssa

Alternatives To ‘The Help’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 17, 2011 at 11:08 am

As much as I really, profoundly disliked and am discomfited by the rapturous reception The Help‘s received in some critical quarters and at the box office, I’m less interested in the badness of this particular piece of art, and more interested in why we keep making Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement movies, and how we can get something different in production. Turns out, all it takes is Brad Pitt, who is adapting Twelve Years a Slave, the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped, held in slave pens in Washington, DC, and sold into bondage in Louisiana. Chewitel Ejiofor (who I love, though I wonder if it’ll make a difference that he’s British rather than American) will play Northup.

I really hope this comes to fruition. We’ve see Martin Luther King Jr. biopics, including Paul Greengrass’s account of King’s support for the striking Memphis sanitation workers and his assassination getting pushed back repeatedly. And McQueen and Ejiofor were supposed to be working on a Fela biopic too, and it’s not clear what happened to that. But it would be so useful and powerful to tell a story like that that explains that the direction from slavery to freedom wasn’t always a one-way journey, that demonstrates the reaches of the vast jaws of the market for slaves, that situates bondage not just in a vanished, Spanish moss-draped Deep South, but on Mall in Washington, DC where we inaugurated the first black president.

There’s a white character in Northup’s story, the Canadian carpenter who smuggled Northup’s letters back to his wife so she’d know what happened to him. But if he comes into the story and departs it through Northup’s narrative, rather than having a movie that follows said white carpenter South and has him discover Northup, I think this movie can avoid a lot of The Help‘s problems. It’s not the existence of good white people in stories about black people that’s the problem. It’s the presumption that their goodness is the most important takeaway from anti-slavery and Civil Rights narratives.

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