Bwahahaha: Hillary-ous interview with Terry Gross

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My goodness, Hillary gets snippy when Terry Gross questions her "evolution" towards same-sex marriage. The fun begins at 6:10.

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Oh, Hillary, just say you used to oppose SSM for political reasons and now you support it for political reasons. The truth would be so refreshing.

Comments

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Andrew Sullivan nicely sums up why gay rights advocates are skeptical about Hillary's track record:

"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."