Jimmy Carter Says U.S. Ready For Gay President

President Jimmy Carter said that the U.S. is ready for a gay President. Big Think recently interviewed the former President and he had some interesting thoughts on a wide variety of topics. When asked if America was falling behind, Carter said, "We've had a serious problem in our country in recent, I'd say few decades, in becoming more inclined toward consumption and gratification on how much we own, rather than having a spirit of innovation and dynamism and producing new products. It was in the 1970s that our nation first became a consumer nation, that is, we bought from foreigners more than we sold to foreigners. And increasingly, that has been a blight on our economic system—increasingly every year. And now we have an enormous trade deficit, that is we buy from foreign nations, particularly China and others, a lot more than we sell them. And it means that they are producing the products that we use. And we used to be the main producer of goods to be sold to our competitive nations that were fairly well off, in particular to the countries that were very poor. That's changed now. So I think we've lost the competitive edge that we had a number of years ago." Carter also addressed the issue of a gay President. "Well I think the entire population of America has come tremendous strides forward in dealing with the issue of gays. And I would say that the answer is yes. I don't know about the next election, but I think in the near future. Because step-by-step we have realized that this issue of homosexuality has the same adverse and progressive elements as when we dealt with the race issue 50 years ago... or 40 years ago. So I would say that the country is getting acclimated to a President who might be female, who might obviously, now be black and who might be as well, a gay person. Yes, I would say the answer is, yes."