from Huffington Post
George Clooney On Gay Marriage: Final Leg Of The Civil Rights Movement
First Posted: 1/13/12 01:41 PM ET Updated: 1/13/12 02:06 PM ET
A long time supporter of marriage equality, George Clooney said on Thursday that he believes its conservative opposition is facing an inevitable decline.
“I think the world is changing and it’s becoming less and less of an issue and I think it shouldn’t be long now,” Clooney told E! Online at the Critics’ Choice Awards. “I think younger people are looking at this like, ‘Who cares?’”
As his good friend Viola Davis won the CCA for Best Actress for her role in racial drama “The Help,” Clooney linked that struggle with the current effort to legalize gay marriage.
“I do believe it’s generational, much like the civil rights movement,” the star, who picked up Best Actor at the CCAs, said. “Young people started taking to the streets and things changed. This really is the final leg of the civil rights movement.”
In December, Clooney signed on to star in the LA staging of the play “Prop 8.” Written by Dustin Lance Black, it is a courtroom reenactment of the courtroom drama behind the federal trial that overturned the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban in California. He told E! that he will be playing lawyer David Boies, who along with Ted Olsen, sued on behalf of gay marriage advocates.
“It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens,” Clooney said in a statement announcing his casting. “I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people — like all human beings — are born equal in dignity and rights.”