Libertarians (the real ones, not the TP type) tend to be atheists. Just saying". 
[Quote=wolfpup]
I didn’t say everything the Libertarian Party does is wrong. I’m pointing out the ideological reasons for this particular stance. I’d also point out that they had nothing to say about gay rights in their first 1972 platform, contrary to your claim that they were some sort of champions of gay rights since their founding. Furthermore, the quoted snippet is just more of the usual anti-government ranting that always comes from these guys – suppose a private business wanted to fire someone just because they were gay? Or because they were black? What do you suppose your beloved champions of human rights would have to say about that? Here’s the answer from the current platform: “Members of private organizations retain their rights to set whatever standards of association they deem appropriate.” Because to the Libertarian, private property rights are more sacred than God.
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In 1972 gay sex was against the law in many states, as were numerous sex acts between consenting adults. The Libertarian Party stood alone in stating that all such laws should be repealed. Neither major party did. You can complain that the Libertarian Party didn’t issue a clear statement of support for gay marriage until a short time later, but it was and still is a small organization with small resources. Expecting them to have churned out clear policy statements from the minute the party first existed is not reasonable. For as long as the Libertarian Party has had a position on gay marriage, it’s been pro.
You say that the Libertarian Party does not support anti-discrimination laws. True. They support prohibition on government discrimination, which was common against gays until very recently, and laws requiring equal treatment of all people by government, as the Constitution says. The Constitution does not say anything about discrimination by private business.
Hillary Clinton will be a champion for gay rights. That’s true. Will it be a cornerstone of her campaign? I doubt it. It might be, but it doesn’t have to be, because she will be running against a Republican.
I must have missed something. I thought you were talking about Sarah Palin there for a minute. You were talking about Bristol on Dancing with the Stars right?
No. For as long as the Libertarian Party has existed, it has had a position on government authority of any kind – and it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s against it. Good cause or bad, doesn’t matter – it opposes it. The problem is that government is necessary for a civilized society. The LP is no more realistic than the Marxist-Leninist Party, it’s just on the opposite end of nonsensical political extremism.
The Supreme Court begs to disagree with you. For example, Jones v. Mayer (1968), an appeal of this lower court ruling:
Petitioners, alleging that respondents had refused to sell them a home for the sole reason that petitioner Joseph Lee Jones is a Negro, filed a complaint in the District Court, seeking injunctive and other relief … The District Court dismissed the complaint and the Court of Appeals affirmed, concluding that 1982 applies only to state action and does not reach private refusals to sell.
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/392/409.html
The Court held in this case that federal law bars all racial discrimination (private or public), in sale or rental of property.
http://civilrights.findlaw.com/discrimination/race-discrimination-u-s-supreme-court-cases.html
I’m not convinced he or anybody else in his shoes had sufficient political capital. Again, he invested enough capital that it killed his honeymoon within about a month of his taking office. That’s a pretty big investment.
As for his executive orders, do you know of any previous President who did as much for gay rights as Bill Clinton did? If no, aren’t you essentially stabbing Bill in the back?
I’ll note that Barnie Frank felt some frustration with the gay rights organizations of the day that demanded political courage from politicians but lacked the cojones to level with their supporters about political reality.
Yeah and so did Paul Wellstone.
Support for gay marriage in 1996: 27%. But sure, let’s talk about DOMA. Bob Dole figured he could use it as a wedge issue for the 1996 Presidential election. Frank thought he might be able to peel off a few votes by characterizing recent decisions in Hawaii to grant same sex marriage as a wholly local matter: leave it to the states!
But Dole had some powerful backers behind him - parts of the LGBT community. They would claim that the Hawaii decision would permit the right to marry for all gay people. As a matter of law, it was wrong. As a matter of politics it was a disaster. It shifted the odds of tieing up DOMA in committee from “Slim” to “None”.
You are essentially arguing that we should be grateful to him for approving a bigoted law, because it was political suicide to do otherwise. That’s bullshit. I understand why a political leader would do what is expedient, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to admire the man for throwing me under the bus. I emigrated because of that law, and though I could go back now, it has soured me on the US forever. It sickens me that people support it in any way. Rather than saying “wow, we were ignorant—in hindsight, what a mistake that was” they say “it saved a Constitutional Amendment from passing,” as if that was a real and eminent threat. (I know the process was begun, but I am not at all confident that it had a realistic chance of passing.)
When you say “gay rights weren’t a big issue back then,” by the way, you mean that they weren’t a big issue to the general public. They were a big issue to some of us, but thanks for reminding me how little we are worth. Flavor of the month, I guess.
No, I think you’d be grateful that the President of the United States that most represents your political positions knows how to make the hard decisions for the greater good. In the early part of the Civil War, the Radical Republicans begged/tried to force Lincoln to openly declare the war’s goal be the destruction of slavery for all time, and that he work to outlaw it completely. Lincoln had never liked slavery, but he knew that this stance and those actions would result in the slaveholding border states secession, and put the risk of losing the war into the realm of “extremely likely.” Lincoln held off on that, even saying early on that if the seceding states put down their arms and made peace, they would be welcomed back with open arms–including their slaveowning.
As the war progressed the politics of that shifted, the North and even the border states became far more willing to pull the plug on slavery and push for a peace in which there would be no negotiation or regard for the South coming back peacefully–losing three quarters of a million Americans on the field of battle has that impact on the psyche. Lincoln was correct to offer the Southern states a way back in with slaves, and he was right to early on avoid denouncing or trying to abolish slavery.
The stakes were not clearly so high for Clinton, but the comparison is roughly the same. You show a frankly simplistic and childish view on this issue, you know that Clinton was powerless to stop it, and that doing so would hurt his election chances, but you think he should’ve vetoed it anyway. You’ve not elucidated any logical reason for this other than “it made me sad and hurt my feelings, waaaa.” You’re the type of voter that is precisely why so little gets done in America, because you can’t look at practicalities past your pet issues. Again, this was not a decision in which Clinton chose to harm gay rights, it was a decision in which he chose not to harm himself–he had no power on the substance of DOMA, only on how it would impact his poll numbers.
Correct, in politics small minority issues that don’t impact elections do not matter. This is what happens in a democracy. In the 90s hardly anyone cared about gay rights other than gays, and gays aren’t a meaningful demographic at the polls due to their small numbers and not ever seriously being “in play.” In more recent years enough heterosexual moderates and left-of-center (and even some right-of-center) types felt that the lack of legal protections for gays and the lack of legal marriage for gays was an injustice and it became a more politically relevant issue, but that was almost twenty years later. Also you particularly, someone who takes your ball and flees instead of trying to effect change in a democratic society, have no value whatsoever in U.S. political discussions and that should be noted in the future. You’ve resigned yourself from that.
Yes, and my completely forgetting that non-discrimination is still not a done deal is a symptom of putting marriage ahead of it in the gay rights agenda. I’m a strong supporter of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation, but I totally forgot about it after the gay marriage SCOTUS decision.
You might have been thrown under a much bigger bus otherwise.
You don’t have to admire, but maybe you can understand. I don’t like it either but history sucks sometimes.
Saying that he did it as a pro-gay thing or for the welfare of gay people is just blind partisanship. Clinton might want to say that now, but the truth is, he did it because he had an election coming up, and gay people were a safe group to fuck over.
No, that’s a self-serving lie the Clintons are trying to peddle now to make them look like marginally less awful people.
I don’t know of any other president who made as many executive orders supporting gay rights, true. On the other hand, I don’t know of any previous presidents who passed as many laws restricting gay rights, either. And considering that the executive orders he signed could be lifted with a stroke of the pen by the next administration, while the laws he signed would require the passage of a new law to repeal, I think the scales tip pretty badly against him.
He should be grateful to them. It seems to me that the last thing he’d want is gay rights organizations being honest with their supporters about what the Democrats were genuinely willing to do for their gay constituents.
Omigosh, Paul Wellstone supported it?! This totally changes everything!
Because now Paul Wellstone can go posthumously fuck himself, too.
This part is true–but anyone who follows politics at all know that the Clintons are not principled people. They never have been, they are nakedly ambitious. FWIW as someone who is 50/50 on possibly voting for Clinton I’d be fine with her saying openly that Bill could not have stopped passage of DOMA (he couldn’t), that it was a Republican stunt designed to hurt his presidency and his reelection and that they had to respond as they did to save the White House, but that they regret it now. I don’t think Clinton’s general election fortunes are remotely impacted by DOMA support anyway, and it at least puts her on better ground politically. I think her staff are being too risk-averse in avoiding a mea culpa on her support for it.
Presidents don’t “pass” laws, they sign them. Some have even argued (people like George Washington) that a President shouldn’t veto a law just because he disagrees with it, but in any case, Clinton could not have prevented DOMA from becoming law.
But ignoring your poor use of words, what laws did Bill “pass” that restricted gay rights, other than DOMA? DADT create no new restrictions on gay rights, and created legal protections for gays in the military. When Clinton signed DADT into law it established protections for gay service members for the first time in the history of the military.
As has been pointed out multiple times in this thread THIS. IS. NOT. TRUE.
This is the lie being spread by the Clinton campaign at present rather than having Bill just man up and admit it was a bad policy. He signed this into law because he was afraid it would hurt his chances of reelection. Period.
I’d be fine with this, too. Even with “they regret it now primarily because the political winds have shifted”; I don’t require them to care personally. I just object to the idea that somehow their actions on the 1990s were good for gays. They weren’t.
Signing DOMA may have been the lesser evil, but it’s still an evil. Clinton had two options: sign the bill, which would pass anyway, or refuse to sign the bill and take the political hit. I understand why he took the less courageous stand, but again, I disagree with his decision. We can hypothesize with confidence that it would have passed over his veto, but we cannot know for absolute certainty.
I paid a price for his [edit: and Congress’s] lack of courage: you (I’m going to crawl out on a limb and guess) did not. Mind you, Clinton holds only a fraction of the blame that Congress as a whole gets for the whole affair. (My representative voted Nay, which I appreciated.)
The concept to keep in mind is Value Over Replacement President: How much better or worse off would you have been with the other plausible option?
For Bill Clinton, those were George HW Bush and/or Bob Dole, two fairly bland time-servers from the Conservative Movement era of the GOP. Do you honestly think they would have been any better than Clinton? Because it’s entirely possible they could have been worse: Throwing gays under the bus to shore up their conservative credentials to keep from getting primaried from the right, as the GOP began its slide into outright reactionary lunacy. Getting something nastier than DOMA through could easily have bought them a good three or four tax increases, despite any past readings of their lips.
No, the Clintons aren’t the kinds of people to pick a hill to die on. You want that, look at Carson and Huckabee. They’re the kinds of people who figure out what’s feasible and what isn’t, and who understand that if a bill is going to pass over their veto, sacrificing their ability to get other equally-important things done isn’t helping a goddamned thing.
I think it was possible, but more importantly, the struggle could have been defensive instead of offensive - most effort put into stopping the constitutional amendment rather than getting gay marriage.
It would have sent a message. Or he could have just let it become law without signing it.
Prove it. (If you already have, please point me to the post).
You may be right, but it requires knowledge of Clinton’s thoughts. And, of course, both could be true.
Proof?
Exactly. Let’s not forget that their support for gay rights early in their administration cost them the good will then generally extended to new Presidents. That matters: it was another nail in the coffin for health care reform. Something that wouldn’t occur for another generation.
[QUOTE=Miller]
I don’t know of any other president who made as many executive orders supporting gay rights, true. On the other hand, I don’t know of any previous presidents who passed as many laws restricting gay rights, either. And considering that the executive orders he signed could be lifted with a stroke of the pen by the next administration, while the laws he signed would require the passage of a new law to repeal, I think the scales tip pretty badly against him.
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Oh I don’t know. It wasn’t a law, but Eisenhower codified a number of anti-gay practices during the 1950s. NYT: “In the McCarthy era of the 1950’s, many Foreign Services officers were purged from the State Department on grounds of homosexuality.”
Opposing the 1995 decision was the Family Research Council, which will surprise no one.