Elton John feels like 'second-class citizen'

Wonderwall, Sunday, January 23, 2011, 9:15am (PST)

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Sir Elton John is "fed up" with being a treated like a "second-class citizen" in the U.S.

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That's why the 63-year-old gay singer said he took a stand last week during a performance at a private Beverly Hills fundraiser for the ongoing legal challenge to California's gay marriage ban. The outspoken British piano man, who became a parent to a baby boy on Christmas Day with partner David Furnish, added that "as I get older, I get more angry about it."

"In this country, we need more dialogue," he said during an interview Friday. "We don't need any more stone throwing. We don't need any more vitriol. We need people to say, 'OK. I'm straight. You're gay. Let's get along. I'm Republican. You're Democratic. Let's work together.' I'm sick and tired of people being hateful to each other in this country."

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John disappointed some gay rights activists after California's Proposition 8 banning gay marriage passed in 2008 when he said he had no desire to get married and was satisfied with his civil partnership in England. He sang a different tune Wednesday when he praised the effort to overturn Proposition 8 and promised to do everything he could to support it, even though he is British.

The couple's son, Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, was born in California through a surrogate mother. John said he was disappointed that members of the Church of England questioned his parenthood in the days following his son's birth. He insisted that he's not against religion and that "Jesus was a wonderful, compassionate man, who forgave on the cross."

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"Everyone is entitled to have their own beliefs and their own spirituality," said John. "The big difference is that the dogma of the church can be so hateful and divisive. It's stuck in the stone age. We don't live in the stone age anymore. The church is losing people left, right and center because people are fed up with the rhetoric that they're giving them."