Susan Sarandon Still Glad She Voted for Jill Stein, Told Her Gay Friends Hillary Has ‘Been Terrible to Gay People’

‘She’s Been Terrible to Gay People for the Longest Time’ Sarandon Says of Hillary Clinton

During the 2016 presidential campaign actress Susan Sarandon was an avid Bernie Sanders supporter. When Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination Sarandon refused to support her, instead voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein (who some on social media believe was knowingly or not part of Russia’s efforts to disrupt the U.S. election.)

Sarandon didn’t just vote for Jill Stein, she actively worked against Hillary Clinton, posting tweets attacking the Democratic nominee as late in the game as October 4.

Many believe those who voted for anyone but Clinton are, at least in part, responsible for putting Trump in the White House. It is true that in many states votes for third party candidates, including Stein and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, were more than enough to have given Clinton the win.

FiveThirtyEight’s Dave Wasserman makes it clear: in the three states in which Trump won the Electoral College vote where he was not expected to win – handing him the presidency – Stein’s votes, had they gone to Clinton, would have given Hillary the White House. For example, Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes, and 51,463 people voted for Stein.

Regardless, suffice it to say Sarandon, who has 570,000 followers on Twitter, is not sorry for supporting Stein, even though for her a Donald Trump presidency is far less destructive than it is for many minorities, LGBT people, and women overall. Sarandon has the wealth and privilege to protect herself from most of Trump’s policies and actions. Most others do not.

The Guardian‘s Emma Brockes interviewed Sarandon. In an article published Sunday, she asks, “Does she have any sympathy with the critique that casting a protest vote is the luxury of those insulated from the effects of a Trump presidency?”

“It wasn’t a protest vote. Following Bernie wasn’t a protest.” Voting for Jill Stein was, by any definition, a protest vote. “Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein. Bringing attention to working-class issues is not a luxury. People are really hurting; that’s how this guy got in. What we should be discussing is not the election, but how we got to the point where Trump was the answer.” (We should also, she says, inching towards the space where the extreme right meets the left, be discussing how “you can’t judge by the mainstream media what’s going on in the country. How did we lose all our journalists and media?”)

And in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Brockes wanted to know if Sarandon “lost friends over all this.” 

“No. My friends have a right to their opinions. It’s disappointing but that’s their business. It’s like in the lead-up to Vietnam, and then later they say: ‘You were right.’ Or strangely, some of my gay friends were like: ‘Oh, I just feel bad for [Clinton]. And I said: ‘She’s not authentic. She’s been terrible to gay people for the longest time. She’s an opportunist.’ And then I’m like: ‘OK, let’s not talk about it any more.’”

Apparently, Sarandon has decided to not fight – but she continues to throw Clinton under the bus, attacking her as “terrible” to LGBT people, when the evidence says otherwise.

OUT magazine’s Rose Dommu sums up Sarandon’s remarks about her support of Jill Stein and her “audacity” of bringing “the gays into it” by saying simply, “Girl, please.”

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Image by David Shankbone via Wikimedia 

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