“We’ve got a black president now,” Smiley said.
“Well, I don’t vote,” Prince said. “I’ve don’t have nothing to do with it. I’ve got no dog in that race.”
“The reason why is that I’m one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Prince said. “And we’ve never voted. That’s not to say I don’t think … President Obama is a very smart individual and he seems like he means well. Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.”
“I don’t see it really as a conversion,” he said. “More, you know, it’s a realization. It’s like Morpheus and Neo in ‘The Matrix.’ ”
Then there was the time Prince came out against gay marriage. In a New Yorker profile in 2008, he slighted Republicans and Democrats — “neither of them is getting it right,” he said — but singled out same-sex marriage as part of the Democrats’ notion that “‘You can do whatever you want.”
“God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out,” he told the magazine. “He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”
If the idea seems bonkers that the man who shrieked with unbridled sexual energy in the outro of “When Doves Cry” is actually a prude, well, maybe it’s not.
“Prince intended sexuality to be linked to the worship of God, and he filled his music with classic Christian messages,” the author Touré wrote in 2013 in “I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon,” “meaning Prince was sexual but, ultimately, very conservative.”
Perhaps Prince’s concert for Gray is part of this complicated moral calculus.
“There’s supposed to be a separation of church and state over here,” Prince told Smiley. “We can’t have a separation of state and morality though.”
washingtonpost.com
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