Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in conversation with Brad Pitt (yes, that Brad Pitt) in Vanity Fair, July 2007:
Brad Pitt: … There's a big argument going on in America right now, on gay rights and equality.
Desmond Tutu: For me, I couldn't ever keep quiet. I come from a situation where for a very long time people were discriminated against, made to suffer for something about which they could do nothing — their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white.
Then, for a very long time in our church, we didn't ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing – their gender. And I'm glad that now the church has changed all that. I'm glad that apartheid has ended.
I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostracized, treated as if they were less than human because of something they could not change — their sexual orientation.
For me, I can't imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted. The Jesus who I worship is a Jesus who is forever on the side of those were being clobbered and he got into trouble precisely because of that. Our church, the Anglican Church, is experiencing a very, very serious crisis. It is all to do with human sexuality. I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching.”