George Takei stuck around after Thursday’s show to give us his own Very Last Word (and kindly pose for a few photos with some of the “Star Trek” fans here on staff). Takei talked about his meeting with Donald Trump this week and his views on marriage equality.
When we were promoting [“The Celebrity Apprentice”] I said I’d like to have lunch with [Trump] and discuss [his] concern about marriage equality, and I expected him to demur. But he said ‘you know something George, I think I can learn something from you.’ So he agreed to it. I was a little taken aback by it, I must say… He is a good business man. We have marriage equality in New York… There are going to be more marriages here, more celebration of their marriages. People coming from other states, like New Jersey, that don’t have marriage equality and coming to New York to celebrate and legalize their union.
And his thoughts on marriage equality:
The core value of marriage is two people who love each other and are committed to each other. It isn’t necessarily defined by gender… You want security for your spouse, whatever may happen, and our laws do not provide that. We want security for when we should pass. I can give you an example: we had friends—it’s past tense now—in Washington, D.C. They’d been together for over a decade. One partner went out of town on a business trip, came back, opened his apartment door and his partner was on the floor…died of a heart attack in his absence. The deceased partner’s relative was a lawyer-brother in Boston from whom he had been estranged. He came and took everything. The laws were against the one that spent more life…They shared their lives and their fortune, yet he lost it all. So this grieving partner lost not only the love of his life, but everything they had built together. There’s that kind of injustice. And this kind of legalistic barrier that we insist on putting up is, to me, unfathomable. In the case of our being incarcerated during the Second World War, we looked different—visually identifiable. But in the case of homophobia, we are literally members of a family. We are sons and daughters of heterosexual parents. We are brothers and sisters. We are literally kin, blood kin. And yet to deny the LGBT member of a family the same legal protections and rights that they enjo…It’s irrational.
