Daughter of Ronald Reagan says he would have supported same-sex marriage
The daughter of Ronald Reagan claims the former president would have supported equal marriage if he’d been alive today.
Speaking to Gwist TV, an online LGBT television channel, Patti Davis said her father would have “been puzzled” by the political fuss and would have supported marriage equality.
“I also think because he wanted government out of people’s lives that he would not understand the intrusion of government banning such a thing. This is not what he would have thought government should be doing,” Davis said.
The 60-year-old also revealed that her father had been friends with a lesbian couple, who once looked after her while their parents were on holiday.
“I grew up in this era where your parents’ friends were all called aunt and uncle,” Davis said. “And then I had an aunt and an aunt. We saw them on holidays and other times.” she added. “We never talked about it, but I just understood that they were a couple.”
Davis made the comments while promoting her new e-book ‘Till Human Voices Wake Us,’ which has been billed as a lesbian love story.
In her interview, Davis said that many people have wrongly tried to claim the Reagan legacy.
“I think people have chosen my father to choose and mould him into whatever they want him to be. He was a very tolerant person. He did not have prejudices against gay people.”
Once when she and her father were watching a Rock Hudson movie, Davis said, she remarked that the actor “looked weird” kissing his female co-star. She said her father explained that Hudson “would rather be kissing a man,” and conveyed, without using the words homosexual or gay, the idea that “some men are born wanting to love another man.”
Hudson died in 1985 and was the first major celebrity to die from an AIDS-related illness.
President Reagan infuriated the LGBT community with his slow response to the AIDS epidemic, although he did win praise as governor of California for joining with Democrats in opposing a ballot that would have prevented gay people from working in public schools.
Davis never discussed the issue of equal marriage with her father when he was alive.