Rupert Everett Being Blasted For Gay Parenting Comments

Rupert Everett planted his foot solidly in his mouth when he said this week that he “can’t imagine anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads,” and, as the comment burned controversy across the internet, few people seem to want to cut the gay actor any slack.

The comments earned Rupert Everett plenty of criticism including a scathing op-ed from The Guardian‘s Patrick Strudwick, who wrote that Everett “suffers from such a paucity of imagination it is all but miraculous he manages to pretend to be other people for a living.”

Writing about Rupert Everett’s contention that there is nothing worse than being raised by gay parents, Strudwick answers:

“A thousand worse things come to mind. But one in particular bellows out — and is played out – in households across the world: being brought up by parents who instil prejudice. Who believe, for example, that to be gay is to be lacking, deviant, ungodly, unfit, improper.”

“And there can be few more profound insults than to assert that someone is unfit to be a parent. Love, in whatever form, nurtures. Fear, in all manifestations, stunts and deforms. Everett is merely this week’s example. In the Sunday Times interview with the 53-year-old and his mother we see what happens to the children of the prejudiced.”

His comments have gotten heat from all corners of the internet. The LGBT blog Lez Get Real took Rupert Everett to task for his remarks, saying that he “does not speak for the Community and he knows it.”

The blog noted:

“Everett went on to say ‘I’m not speaking on behalf of the gay community. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m part of any ‘community.’ The only community I belong to is humanity and we’ve got too many children on the planet, so it’s good not to have more.’ ”

“The problem for Everett is that, from what we can tell, he isn’t a very nice person. This might have more to do with why he isn’t exactly getting many jobs in Hollywood or why he’s kind of been on the outside of the Gay Community.”

Everett’s remarks prompted Ben Summerskill, CEO of the LGBT rights advocacy group Stonewall, to issue a response saying, “Rupert should get out a little bit more to see the facts for himself. There is absolutely no evidence that the kids of gay parents suffer in the way they are being brought up or in how they develop.”

This wasn’t even the first time that Rupert Everett blasted gay parenting, Entertainment Weekly noted. In a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast, he called the practice “utterly hideous” and “egocentric and vain.”