Former President Jimmy Carter says Jesus Christ would approve of gay marriage

While promoting his new book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview that he thinks Jesus would approve of gay marriage.

“I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else,” Carter said in a HuffPost Live interview with Marc Lamont Hill.

“I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage,” he said. “That’s just my own personal opinion.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter CDC Foundation Video Screen Shot

Carter said that while he supports same-gender weddings, he doesn’t think churches who disagree with the practice should be required to perform them.

“But those two partners should be able to go to the local court house or a different church and get married,” he said.

This sounds like his recent remarks.

“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 in the fall.

When asked if he saw same-sex marriage being established nationwide, Carter said, “I’m kind of inclined to let the states decide individually.”

Carter, who identifies as a “born-again Christian” was on the Huffington Post program to discuss his new book “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety.” Carter’s faith and spirituality are heavily talked about in the memoir.

Carter on gay marriage:

“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 in October.

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.

In September 2014, while speaking at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Community College, Carter said, “I never knew of any word or action of Jesus Christ that discriminated against anyone.”

“I think discrimination against anyone and depriving them of actual equal rights in the United States is a violation of the basic principles of the Constitution that all of us revere in this country,” Carter said.

photo Julyo based on work by Gilbert Baker, 1979 via wikimedia commons

President Barack Obama talks with former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and former First Lady Barbara Bush at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas, Texas, April 25, 2013. First Lady Michelle Obama talks with former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the background. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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