It’s been over 20 years since Bill Clinton was elected president. But the man who codified the military ban on openly gay members (DADT) and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was nowhere to be found on Saturday night as the celebrated, and in some corners venerated, 42nd ex-president spoke to an influential gathering of gay rights mover and shakers.
Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner in Washington, D.C., Clinton indulged the crowds thirst for pro-gay language, reports Politico.com. ““One thing we have learned is no human heart is immune to an honest outreach,” he said. “No one can forever ignore their personal experience. If you ask somebody who the most conservative member of the Bush administration was, most people say Dick Cheney. But Dick Cheney was for gay marriage [and] gay rights because of his daughter [Mary Cheney is gay], because of his personal human experience.”
While the gay rights group showed nearly unanimous support for the master politician, the crowd saved their biggest applause for Hillary Clinton, the all-but-presumptive Democratic candidate for the ticket in 2016. The former president noted her support for gay rights during her time at State, when she said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”
Couples who had gotten married in the past year were asked to stand up, and a sizable number of people in the room rose, the article notes. But Clinton told the audience to stay focused on notching more wins through concerted campaigns, both legally and in the court of public opinion. He quoted former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who said one should campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and Clinton said the organization needs to do both at the same time. “Campaigns, the best of them, fire idealism and spark intensity,” he said. “They exhaust and exhilarate in equal measure, and they count on the fire of inspired determination to keep them going.”
Despite her brand recognition, there is a vocal segment of the Democratic Party whose response to Hillary Clinton, specifically her public record on gay rights, has been luke-warm at best. Writing a scathing descent in his column The Dish, Andrew Sullivan seemed to sum up how – and why – many view her so dimly. Addressing her appearance with Terri Gross on NPR’s All Things Considered, Sullivan writes:
“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. We’ve just got to hope the polling stays strong.”
