Via BuzzFeed: There’s No Evidence In Clinton White House Documents For Clintons’ Story On Anti-Gay Law.
Yes, Republicans were/are worse—sometimes much, much worse—on marriage equality. That doesn’t mean we should excuse every attempt by the Clintons, Obama and others to make themselves look much more nobler than they were. Truth should mean something other than spin.
Scott Shackford has more. Hillary Clinton’s Bizarre Gay Marriage Revisionism Doesn’t Fool Those Who Remember. And he tweets: “There are now gay people semi-defending DOMA in order to protect Hillary and I honestly don’t know what to say.”
10 Comments for “Hillary Tells a Tale”
posted by Doug on
” Truth should mean something other than spin.”
Kindly tell that to the GOP candidates in the debate on Wednesday evening. If lying was a capital offense they would all be pushing up daisies by now.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Via BuzzFeed: There’s No Evidence In Clinton White House Documents For Clintons’ Story On Anti-Gay Law.
I’m not surprised. It was well understood at the time that President Clinton’s signature on the DOMA bill was a political tactic, intended to defuse the same-sex marriage issue for the November 1996 election. The idea that DOMA was necessary to stave off a federal marriage amendment is fiction. The FMA was not proposed in Congress until 2002, eight years later, and didn’t pick up much in the way of steam until President Bush endorsed the FMA in 2004 as part of the Bush/Rove/Mehlman reelection strategy.
Yes, Republicans were/are worse—sometimes much, much worse—on marriage equality.
Yup. And on every other issue related to gays and lesbians. Still are.
That doesn’t mean we should excuse every attempt by the Clintons, Obama and others to make themselves look much more nobler than they were.
Of course not. It doesn’t seem to be happening, either, judging from the number of “Hey, wait a damn minute …” call outs from LGBT activists about Hillary’s self-serving spin.
Truth should mean something other than spin.
Yeah. Well, good luck with that …
Historians will, in time, write accurate histories of the LGBT movement toward equality. Right now the issue of “equal means equal” remains contentious (as in outrage over the Equality Act of 2015), and politicians will spin.
posted by JohnInCA on
Tell you what… when I stop hearing about “but it’s the same position Obama had in 2008!” maybe I’ll care enough.
Then again, I live in California (shocking reveal, I know). So the nominees will already be chosen by the time I get to vote in the primaries. So I don’t think it’ll actually matter when it comes to my vote.
posted by Houndentenor on
I wasn’t thrilled with Clinton’s signing DOMA and appalled later that fall when he ran radio ads in the south bragging about signing it. But of course at the time gay marriage didn’t seem like even a remote possibility in my lifetime and his opponent (Dole, for you young-uns who weren’t around yet) wasn’t even for employment nondiscrimination for gay people! So I voted to re-elect Clinton despite my disappointment.
Fast forward to March 2016 (when I will vote on Super Tuesday). My choices will be Clinton and Sanders who both have flaws but both of whom support my equal rights under the law. Both took awhile to get here, just like most of the country. I’d rather vote for someone who was for full equality all along and maybe by 2024 I’ll have such a candidate to support. In the meanwhile I’m more concerned about Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq War which I opposed at the time. But then I think about the freak show that is the GOP. Clinton’s revisionist history seems tame compared to the outright lies told earlier this week by Bush, Carson, Fiorino, Cruz and others. Do any of them support any rights for gay people at all? Clinton may have taken some time to evolve but at least she was capable of evolving. Are any of the Republican candidates good at all on gay rights? I have reservations about Clinton as a primary voter but in the general? Not against anyone who has so far announced.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Bush, Carson, Fiorino, Cruz and others. Do any of them support any rights for gay people at all?
Well, all of them support the right of gay people to remain unmarried.
posted by Jorge on
I don’t know about that. After one of Carson’s remarks I think he might support prison segregation.
Rick Santorum, at least, supports the right of gay people to work for him.
posted by Wilberforce on
DOMA was a political tactic. Bill threw us under the bus there. Although it may be shocking to those in a sugar coated world, it happens.
More importantly, right out of the gate, Bill lead with DADT, which was supposed to be a compromise to help gay service people, until it was betrayed by military leaders. That and many other acts of the Clintons show that they were and have always been on our side. It’s an easy point to understand, except for voters in fantasy land.
posted by Jorge on
Sorry, I am still with Hillary Clinton 100% on this. “No evidence” does not mean “not true,” especially considering the context that Bill supported the law on its own merits. Hillary used to be well-known to be more liberal than Bill. It is not out of the realm of possibility that, faced with a decision she did not agree with, she chose to accept the decision based on a decidedly minor rationale, then played it up in her own mind–I do that all the time.
But I think it’s much more likely that the actual proposal of the Federal Marriage Amendment had such a strong impact on people that people can’t remember a history in which it did not exist.
The better accurate comparison should be to Hillary Clinton’s own past contemporaneous statements defending the president’s signature of Defense of Marriage Act when she was asked directly, I believe as a Senator. This was before 2004, and she did not make mention of the FMA.
And at the time I was perfectly fine with her answer. I have never opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, and being the minimally competent Democratic party politician that she is she made sure to say some very nice things about gay people. I am not changing my opinion of Hillary Clinton. It is exactly as she stated in the Democratic debate: she is the candidate who can get things done.
In the meanwhile I’m more concerned about Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq War which I opposed at the time.
Have you figured out why President Obama respected her judgment enough to select her as Secretary of State? 🙂
Foreign policy is also my biggest concern in this election (hence I’m cheering for three candidates who have almost nothing else in common). My biggest concern with the Democratic candidates in general is that I do not believe any of them will commit to reversing the nuclear deal with Iran. But I can live with Clinton now. Even though she specifically endorsed the Iran deal during the debate (*hack!-hack!-choke!*), she gave a rationale that I cannot accept in context but which I can accept as an overall worldview. In my mind that’s a code for saying she is not fully committed to this deal, and would be willing to reverse it if her conditions are not met. The reason the Republican party is afraid of her is not because they falsely think she’s a progressive loon, even though she really is one on some issues.
posted by Jorge on
Even though she specifically endorsed the Iran deal during the debate (*hack!-hack!-choke!*), she gave a rationale that I cannot accept in context but which I can accept as an overall worldview.
That kind of statement pretty much sums up why I do not judge politicians’ support of the gay community based solely, or even primarily, on their actual positions on cases and controversies, past or present. I judge them on what I discern to be their ideology.
posted by Kosh III on
” I’d rather vote for someone who was for full equality all along”
Then vote for Jill Stein. Greens have been on our side since day one. Of course the corporate media won’t give them the time of day and she’ll probably be arrested and held incommunicado like last time.
It’s not like Bernie or whomever will carry Texas, or Tennessee.