On Thursday, BBC News featured a Nick Higham interview with the best-selling American novelist Jodi Picoult. Her latest book, Sing You Home, is a tract for gay marriage and gay parenting. Entertainment Weekly oozed that it "deftly personalizes the political, delivering a larger message of tolerance that's difficult to fault." In other words, it deftly attacks conservative Christians for intolerance. Picoult told Higham of the BBC that "You are far more progressive than we are, unfortunately, in America."
In her book, Picoult's main character becomes a lesbian after he marriage breaks down over infertility, and she wants to give her embryos to her lover: "The problem is that Zoe’s ex-husband Max has joined a very right-wing evangelical church in America, one that has a very strong anti-gay platform, and since the embryos are biologically half-his, she needs his consent to do it, and he says ‘Over my dead body.’" Picoult insists that "most Christians" are liberals and only "people on the fringes" that insist on what the Bible says:
It is an extremely religious country, and by that, I don’t mean that people are spiritual. I mean that people think there is no difference between being holy and being holier-than-thou. And there are a lot of people who are very faithful and very supportive of gay rights, which is terrific. And there are people on the fringes who are not supportive of gay rights and say the reason I’m not is because it’s in my Bible, and my Bible is right and you are wrong. And that is the group that’s really being addressed in Sing You Home.
It’s very clear this is not the mainstream of Christianity in America. Most Christians are very happy to talk about gay rights. But there is a very vocal minority right now that unfortunately has both the megaphone and the pulpit. And they’re doing a lot of yelling and have a lot of political activism that is working hard to keep gay parenting and gay marriage from being a reality.
Higham added, "Now while you were writing this book, your teenage son came out to you as gay, which I don’t think came as a surprise to you, but did it change your approach to the book?" Picoult replied that the gay agenda was now her "mission" as a mother:
It probably had more of an effect of me wanting to write about it in the first place, because although I already had been working on the book when Kyle came out, I knew he was most likely gay. And I think that’s one of the reasons this topic became an important one for me to write about. It was after he wrote about it that it became very personal. It was no longer a philosophical exploration of a contentious issue for me. It was a mission for me as a mom that the world is a better place by the time my son is ready to get married and have kids.
The book also comes with a CD of folk songs to introduce each chapter because if the newly lesbian protagonist "could pour her heart out to you, it’s a lot harder for you as a reader to say ‘No, you don’t deserve the things I have.'"
Ellen DeGeneres interviewed Picoult for a web exclusive video last month and explained she received an advance copy, and loved it so much that explained she wanted to make a movie out of the book. "I’m very excited about it."
After Picoult explained gay rights are "the last set of human rights we haven't granted in America," DeGeneres asked her "Have you always been this open-minded, or is it something that has grown in you?...Have you ever been a person that didn’t understand it?" Picoult said she's always been "accepting," but it more so now. She added a portion of the proceeds from autographed copies go to the Trevor Project for "LGBTQ" teenagers whose parents aren't so "accepting."
