PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON (1946–)

 

President Clinton’s middle-of-the-night signing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 did permanent damage to his relationship with gay activists and supporters, who had believed his commitment to their right to live openly and with dignity. At the 2013 GLAAD Awards, where he accepted an award for his support of LGBT rights, he spoke out against DOMA. “You signed it!” an angry audience member called out, an act during his presidency for which Clinton has been reluctant to take responsibility.

On March 7, 2013, a month before the GLAAD awards, President Clinton wrote a Washington Post op-ed entitled “It’s Time to Overturn DOMA,” attempting to explain—and correct—his earlier action. He begins with the obvious:

 

In 1996, I signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Although that was only seventeen 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, but some were moving in that direction. Washington, as a result, was swirling with all manner of possible responses, some quite draconian.

 

President Clinton then describes that, behind the scenes, a bipartisan group of former senators filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court stating that they believed the passage of DOMA “would defuse a movement to enact a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which would have ended the debate for a generation or more.” When DOMA came to his desk, it was overwhelmingly supported by Congress—and opposed by a mere 81 of the 535 members. Given that support, as well as his hope that federally defining marriage as between a man and a woman was a safer route than risking a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, he signed the bill.

But President Clinton goes beyond attempting to justify the hard place in which he found himself when he signed DOMA into law; he admits fault.

 

On March 27, DOMA will come before the Supreme Court, and the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution . . .

When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that “enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.” Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory.

 

Listing the now-familiar litany of bigotries that were once just called life (slavery, lack of suffrage), Clinton writes:

 

While our laws may at times lag behind our best natures, in the end they catch up to our core values. One hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln concluded a message to Congress by posing the very question we face today: it is not “Can any of us imagine better?” but “Can we all do better?” The answer is of course and always yes.