There has been a general understanding since 2008 that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be the heir to President Obama’s legacy. What’s been in the works for 8 years is a Democratic Party that has always been behind Secretary Clinton, keeping the party moderate and falling in line with moderate views to protect her. I’ve written about that here, should you care to read.
But, as a liberal gay man, I could never vote for her again (I did in the 2008 primary), forsaking the Party and liberalism at the same time. True, there are concerns about what happens if she wins the Democratic nomination and is squaring off against someone like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and Clinton doesn’t have enough support from the left. It’s possible men like Trump or Cruz could win, and nobody wants that. So why would I risk that?
Instead, let me ask you something, why should the LGBT community support Hillary Clinton? Because since 2013 she’s been a supporter of ours? Oh, no, that is not enough for me. And just because I’m a giant dick, I’m going to be offering Bernie Sanders up as the juxtaposition on this issue. The two are facing off to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, so why not compare them alongside each other. If her record is as clear as she purports, she certainly won’t mind.
I’m starting off here with some background on some of the landmark moments in American politics as they pertain LGBT history, but the latter half of the piece is where it gets really interesting.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT)
Some people might tell you it’s inappropriate, unfair even, to hold Hillary Clinton accountable for an initiative to prevent openly gay men and women from serving in the United States military that was enacted by her husband. I call bullshit. First, and let me be very clear, this was not a piece of legislature presented by a member of Congress. This was Defense Directive 1304.26 on December 21, 1993, something then President Bill Clinton initiated himself.
What did DADT do? While technically lifting a full ban on gays in the military, it also told them that they couldn’t come out and be open, and if they did they’d be discharged from service. In other words, “shut up faggot and sit quietly in your closet.” Anyone who’s lived in the closet knows that it’s a very lonely place. Forcing LGBT citizens to stay in the closet was not healthy. Full stop. It wasn’t healthy for the individuals, and it certainly wasn’t healthy for the gay community as a whole. Should you care to challenge the assertion that LGBT people being kept in the closet is unhealthy, you should probably know that it’s been proven that coming out of the closet makes people happier and healthier.
To make matters worse for Secretary Clinton, may we present the fact that there were many people who openly opposed DADT, and one of those people was Bernie Sanders, who even defended gay soldiers in front of Congress in 1995, at a time when it wasn’t politically advantageous to do so. When did Hillary Clinton finally opposed DADT? When she was running for the open Senate seat from New York in 1999, but only after she realized she was losing support from LGBT voters to Republican Rudy Giuliani.
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
DOMA, at the federal level, defined marriage as between one man and one woman, clearly leaving same-sex relationships out in the cold. It also gave states the right to officially ban marriages between two members of the same sex, and ushered in the wave of state constitutional amendments that would prevent loving same-sex couples from marrying all across the country; it was a very shitty law. This was a bill signed into law in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, and it’s a law Hillary Clinton wouldn’t formally disagree with in its entirety until 2013. In 1999, she did opposed the part denying federal benefits to LGBT people in civil unions, but that was about 2 years later than her opponent in a Senate race, Rudy Giuliani. She still opposed federal benefits to same-sex couples who were married in states with marriage equality until 2013.
As was the case with DADT, Mr. Bernie Sanders opposed the bill from the very start in the House of Representatives. This type of stance is also something he fought against back in the 1970s running for Governor of Vermont as a member of the Liberty Union Party. You know, some 30-40 years before Hillary Clinton got around to joining the nation in the idea that gay and bisexual people should be free to marry members of the same sex. Hillary Clinton didn’t support marriage equality until March of 2013, just three months before the Supreme Court would undo the federal ban on same-sex marriage. And as someone who was very vested in that ruling, allow me to point out that everyone on earth knew the Supreme Court would strike down part of DOMA. So, yes, Hillary Clinton came out in support of marriage equality once she had to, not when the LGBT community needed her to.
Marriage Equality
DOMA is it’s own issue, and marriage equality was an entire movement that required politicians, movie stars and the American public to get behind it to succeed. You know who was late to that party? Hillary Clinton, who didn’t support full marriage equality until March of 2013, just 3 months before the Supreme Court would nullify the most egregious part of DOMA — the part that said federal benefits would not be a right of married same-sex couples. The Economist labeled that a “farcically late conversion,” which I find particularly fitting.
That hardly makes her a trailblazer. You know who beat her to supporting marriage equality?
- Dick Cheney did in 2004, nine years before Hillary Clinton.
- In 2010, saying “…when couples are committed to each other and love each other…they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has,” Laura Bush also came out in support before Hillary Clinton.
- Jon Huntsman beat Clinton to the draw in February 2013, just a month earlier than Hillary Clinton.
- David Koch, the evil super donor for the GOP, even supported marriage equality before Hillary Clinton.
They’re all insanely conservative. Okay, Huntsman isn’t that conservative on some issues, but he’s a Mormon. A fucking Mormon beat Hillary Clinton to marriage equality.
Hillary Clinton waited until 60% of the American public supported Marriage Equality. You know who didn’t? Bernie Sanders. Now, this doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a champion of gay rights in the strictest sense of the word. It was never one of his primary policy positions, simply because he wanted to get money out of politics first. Hey, at least he didn’t have to “evolve” on the issue.
Equal Protection through Civil Rights
There has not been one point when Hillary Clinton has proposed or supported legislation that would extend all civil rights to LGBT people, including in housing and employment, until her current presidential campaign. She supports them now, but it’s very difficult to pinpoint a date on that conversion. The best date we can get is 2009, when Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, helped the Obama administration extend federal benefits to to the partners of employees of the federal government, including Clinton’s State Department. Whether or not to credit Clinton here is up to the individual. I myself choose not to, as it was President Obama’s government-wide initiative and not isolated to the State Department.
Bernie Sanders wanted to extend civil protections to LGBT people as far back as the 1983, so about 26 years earlier than Secretary Clinton.
When Clinton did finally come to her senses by fighting for the Civil Rights of LGBT Americans, she did so late. And I don’t mean fashionably late. As I think I’ve demonstrated thus far, Hillary Clinton took up the cause of LGBT rights when it was politically convenient to do so. Waiting until 2013 to support marriage equality–when it was all but certain that the Supreme Court would overturn the worst part of the Defense of Marriage Act (which Hillary continued to support in parts until her current presidential campaign)–is not progressive. It’s opportunistic and hollow, adjectives Ms. Clinton should be familiar with.
Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay journalist who has worked for The New Republic, The Atlantic, Time and other projects, has quite a bit to say on this very matter. Though he considers himself a conservative, Sullivan has long been an advocate of LGBT rights, and he’s incredibly critical of Hillary Clinton’s record on the subject. Read what he had to say about Hillary Clinton and gay rights:
She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed).
What I’d like to hear her answer is whether she regrets that period and whether she will ever take responsibility for it. But she got pissed when merely asked how calculated her position on this was. Here’s my guess: Unlike Obama, she was personally deeply uncomfortable with this for a long time and politically believed the issue was a Republican wedge issue to torment the Clintons rather than a core civil rights cause. I was editor of TNR for five years of the Clintons, aggressively writing and publishing articles in favor of marriage equality and military service, and saw the Clintons’ irritation with and hostility to gay activists up close. Under my editorship, we were a very early 1991 backer of Clinton – so I sure didn’t start out prejudiced against them. They taught me that skepticism all by themselves, and mainly by lying all the time.
So when did she evolve? Maybe in the middle 2000s. Was political calculation as big an influence as genuine personal wrestling? She’s a Clinton. They poll-tested where to go on vacation. Of course it was. But she’s also a human being and probably came around personally as well. She’s not a robot, after all. But I think of her position as the same as the eponymous gay rights organization the Clintons controlled in the 1990s, the Human Rights Campaign. As long as marriage equality hurt the Democrats, they were against it. Now it may even hurt Republicans, they’re for it. So Hillary is for it now.
Oh, you mean it’s all about political gain? No, surely the issue of civil rights can’t be a matter of garnering votes, can it?
Do you want proof of this? Take a look at this email from 2011. If the Republicans did one thing right, it was forcing Secretary Clinton to produce her emails sent and received from that private server she kept in her private residence.
In case you can’t read that, let me go over it with you. In 2010 the State Department began making changes to its passport application forms. All of these changes were very innocuous, but there was one change in particular that stood out to Secretary Clinton. They changed the terms “Mother” and “Father” to “Parent 1” and “Parent 2,” something the Washington Post picked up on.
Clinton’s response (emphasis mine):
Who made the decision that State will not the terms “mother and father” and instead substitute “parent one and parent two”? I’m not defending that decision, which I disagree w and knew nothing about, in front of this Congress. I could live w letting people in nontraditional families choose another descriptor so long as we retained the presumption of mother and father. We need to address this today or we will be facing a huge Fox-generated media storm led by Palin et al.
Let’s get one thing straight (no pun intended), there is nothing nontraditional about same-sex couples and their families, precisely because there’s no such thing as a traditional family. Unless of course she meant families with one heterosexual woman and one heterosexual man who produced children via “God’s preferred method of natural vaginal intercourse.” This leaves out single moms, single dads, grandparents raising their grandchildren, aunts or uncles who’ve adopted nieces and nephews, and, naturally, same-sex parents, to say nothing of all adoptive parents. Families are not made by one cis man and one cis woman; families are made by unconditional love and support for one another–something Secretary Clinton didn’t seem to understand in 2010. A decision was made, she refused to defend it, disagreed with it and even wanted it reverted back to excluding same-sex parents. How very LGBT-friendly of her. Really, if that’s not trailblazing for LGBT right, I don’t know what is.
The part that really drives me over the edge, though, is when she made it all about herself and her staff, instead of about the loving families with LGBT members. Look back to the last sentence, “We need to address this today or we will be facing a huge Fox-generated media storm led by Palin et al.” Well, it’s good to know she’s at least been consistent in protecting her own political ambitions, if not the rights of LGBT Americans.
Perhaps this isn’t all just about politics, like Hillary Clinton claimed in a very contentious interview with NPR’s Terry Gross in 2014, when the host pressed her on her “evolving” views. To be fair, I’m willing to consider that there was a legitimate evolution taking place in the heart of Hillary Clinton. The following is an audio recording of longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton friend Taylor Branch, who in the 1990s had a series of interviews with President Clinton as part of an oral history project. Bill kept the original recordings, though Branch did keep an audio diary for himself during the time. I’ve included one of those recordings Branch made of himself immediately after he interviewed President Clinton. The words aren’t Bill’s, but rather an interpretation of Bill’s words at the time by Branch. I encourage you to listen to the recording, but the gist of it is that Branch got the impression, through his interview with the President, that Hillary Clinton was extremely uncomfortable with LGBT people and their “acting out.” Taylor Branch was friends will both of the Clintons, and these recordings are from that time period, not some post-Obergefell v. Hodges revisionist history.
Look, people are free to develop over time, to grow and to become better individuals. There’s no fault there. The part that is unforgivable to me, and many others, is that Hillary Clinton has long portrayed herself as an LGBTQ ally, disingenuously. What she doesn’t tell you is that she’s only been one when it serves her. When the gay community was trying to recover from the devastation of the AIDS crisis, where were she and her husband? Telling gay people to stay in the closet and denying them federal benefits when in loving relationships, that’s what the Clintons were doing. In the early and mid-2000s, when LGBTQ people began fighting back against states that were outlawing same-sex marriages all across the nation, then Senator Clinton was completely silent on the matter, except when in 2004 she said, “…the fundamental bedrock principle that [marriage] exists between a man and a woman, going back into the midst of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they are to become adults.”
Don’t believe me? Here’s the video.
All of this can be forgiven, and for the most part it is. Personally, I’ve forgiven my father for his shitty views on homosexuality and how he treated me when I came out. The same has been done countless times across the country, by millions of individuals in the LGBTQ community. But forgiveness has to be earned, to a certain degree, and when I forgave my father it was because he genuinely felt remorse for the way he treated his queer son. His conversion from anti-gay religious fuckwit to LGBTQ ally came out of respect for me and people like me. It sure as hell didn’t come from political motivation, à la Hillary Clinton. Besides, I wouldn’t vote for my father if he were running for President, either.
People evolve on issues, and I’m really okay with that. At one point I was so anti-choice that I deserved to be kicked in the nuts so hard I could taste them; then I evolved on the issue. I was also 18 at the time, so #youthfulignorance. I evolved because I realized that having views that limited the rights of others was both un-American and not copacetic with my greater world view. I was wrong, and I changed because of that–not because it would benefit me. Once upon a time Hillary Clinton was anti-LGBTQ equality, but she says she’s evolved on the issue. By my own admissions, I should forgive, forget and move on. I would, if only she didn’t evolve so she could get elected to the highest office in the land. Each and every single time she evolved on theLGBTQ issue, from her stance in 1999 opposing DADT to her 2013 revising of her views on DOMA, it has been for political gain. Civils rights should never be up for discussion, and they certainly shouldn’t be a tool to be exploited for political gain. I am not her tool, and I greatly resent Hillary Clinton for treating me like one and taking me for granted. It’s what the GOP does with their evangelical base, and I refuse to be treated the same way by a supposedly progressive Democratic candidate for president. But, gay people who decide to vote for Hillary Clinton must be okay with that, being tools. And when I say tools, I don’t mean the 23 year old white kid living in his mother’s basement that puts 20″ spinners on his 1998 Honda Civic sedan, but like a screwdriver or a hammer. They’re just there for her use, and as soon as she doesn’t need them anymore, she’ll hang them up somewhere out of the way, never to be thought of again until they can serve a purpose.
If you want a true LGBTQ ally, one whose record dates back on the issue long before it was popular or convenient to be one, vote for Bernie Sanders. If you enjoy pandering blowhards full of banal platitudes, I imagine Hillary Clinton will suit you just fine.
Also, as a gay man, I’d be remiss and doing the larger LGBTQ community a disservice if I didn’t show my gratitude to the millions of everyday people who have been fighting for our rights for decades. That would be people like Richard John Jack Baker and James Michael McConnell, who were the first openly gay couple to significantly challenge for the right to marry in 1970. It would include the millions of lesbians, queer allies, trans Americans, and other minority groups who were out there marching and fighting long before a politician would claim us as friends, both religious and the religiously unaffiliated. We also owe a big thanks to companies who have given us spousal rights and equal protections when the law wouldn’t step up and do the same. Essentially, the LGBTQ community owes a lot of thanks to a lot of people. Hillary Clinton just shouldn’t be high up on that list. As for Bernie Sanders, sneak him somewhere in the middle; there are others to thank first.
