Bill Clinton is making headlines for writing an op-ed asking the Supreme Court to overturn the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.
This month, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to DOMA, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman for federal law purposes.
Clinton's op-ed urging the high court to strike down the 1996 law is notable. After all, Clinton's the one who signed DOMA in the first place.
The law has had the practical effect of denying gay couples tax and other benefits that straight couples get. But it has also had the symbolic impact of codifying "unequal treatment of gays and lesbians," as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has written.
Why would a Democratic president sign such a hateful law? Here's what Clinton wrote:
"In 1996, I signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Although that was only 17 years ago, it was a very different time. In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right ..."
Clinton went on to quote an amicus brief signed by a bipartisan group of senators urging the high court to overturn DOMA.
Those senators, like many DOMA suppporters, thought it would “would defuse a movement to enact a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more.”
"It was under these circumstances that DOMA came to my desk, opposed by only 81 of the 535 members of Congress," Clinton wrote.
Yes, 1996 was a very different time for gays in America. Ellen Degeneres was a year a way from coming out of the closet, and Massachusetts wouldn't legalize same-sex marriage for eight years.
But the entire impetus for enacting DOMA was a Hawaii Supreme Court decision indicating the state was leaning towards legalizing gay marriage.
The country was arguably making some progress in the gay rights arena, and DOMA was potentially a big setback. Clinton's sugggestion that DOMA helped the nation avert a Constitutional amendment is pretty far-fetched, too.
It's really, really hard to amend the U.S. Constitution. Maryland was the first state to approve 27th amendment in 1789, but it didn't get fully ratified until 1992.
The biggest reason for Clinton signing DOMA is probably not an excuse he'd write about in any op-ed column. It was political.
Clinton lost control of Congress in 1994, and he was pretty concerned about the public's opinion about him. As The New Yorker points out, Clinton just got "boxed in by his political opponents."
So, he threw gay rights under the bus, just three years after backing a policy that effectively kept members of the U.S. military in the closet.
Now that DOMA is likely going the way of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Clinton is pretty smart to distance himself from the anti-gay marriage law as much as possible. He should just be a little bit more honest about why he backed it in the first place.
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