Did Clinton sign DOMA because he knew a veto would be overridden? Given his change of heart on the issue, this explanation seems plausible.
I think he’s a politician who thought signing it would be more popular than vetoing it. At the time, he was probably right. But still disappointing.
This. Remember, DOMA was passed 85-14 in the Senate, with even liberal hero Paul Wellstone voting for it. It passed 342-67 in the House. That’s overwhelming support, even for those more collegial times. The rapidity of the change in public opinion on this is incredible. In 1996, there was VERY little support for marriage equality among non-gay/lesbian people. Even our allies were very leery about it.
I don’t really blame Clinton for this. Even if he’d vetoed it, there was more than enough support in Congress to override.
Given that he ran ads touting his signing of DOMA, it’s pretty clear he was all-in on the issue:
I guess it is because, beyond signing the bill into law, the 1996 Clinton campaign decided to run ads on Christian radio bragging that DOMA had become the law of the land. I guess it is because, even after all these years, it still makes me sick that people like Harold Ickes, then a key adviser to Clinton, threatened to leave the ads on the air if I dared to claim victory for demanding they come down. Plenty of people hated the decision to run those ads on Christian radio – people like George Stephanopoulos, I am told. But it was the president himself who wanted to run them and asked in anger whether he had any say in the matter.
Given his change or heart on the issue, maybe he had a change of heart on the issue? I think lots of people have had a change of heart on the issue in the last 20 years.
At the time, as well as now, I read the move as purely political, simply throwing the hyenas a bone in the hopes they’d stop biting somewhere it mattered - a decision enabled by the then-fact that it was never going to have any real impact on any real person’s lives. I wished he hadn’t done it, but I rationalized it that way myself.
Maybe I’m overly cynical, but I doubt his personal feelings on the matter meant a damn thing. It was all political maneuvering.
Way back then, I was just as gung ho about gay rights as I am now, however I thought that pushing for gay marriage was a bad idea as the country wasn’t ready for it and the backlash would prevent gays from getting more attainable rights and recognition. A few years before I was in Oregon when aballot measure to force schools to teach that homosexuality was a deviant, and to fire all gay teachers was narrowly defeated.
I would of course have preferred that DOMA never existed, but since the Republicans had set the trap I could sympathize with Clinton signing in an election year it to avoid the prospect of an even more right wing congress, or even a president Dole.
Its truly amazing how far we’ve come in just 20 years.
I think these days Clinton also says that if he hadn’t signed that law, Bush would have been able to pass an anti-gay marriage Constitutional amendment. His view is that that DOMA wound up relieving some of that pressure in a way that was easier to reverse. And that might actually be true, but I don’t think that’s why he signed the law. It was just the smart political move for him to make, and I’ve always imagined it was a huge betrayal for gay Democrats who had supported him.
At the time, it was the right move politically. I can think of no other issue on which public opinion has changed so quickly. For Clinton to favor gay marriage then would have been political suicide.
Again, you have to remember that 1996 was a totally different world than 2014. I don’t think even the most radical of gay rights advocates imagined that something like DOMA wouldn’t happen once Hawaii’s Supreme Court came down with that ruling. There wasn’t the bolster of successes and triumphs that we have at our backs today to give us any hope of winning on the subject at the time.
I wasn’t HAPPY with Clinton for signing it, but I was pragmatic enough to realize it was the only real thing he could do in 1996, an election year. Even Paul Wellstone (the Liberal Senate God) voted for DOMA, which was much more of a betrayal than Clinton signing it.
I agree that not signing it would have been hugely injurious not only to Clinton, but to the Democrats in general. A veto would have been a gift to the republicans, who would have hammered away at it in every election ad at every level. “Clinton and the Democrats are in favor of doing away with traditional marriage!” It would have set marriage equality back another twenty years.
So I think in the long run, it worked as a sort of safety that allowed gay rights advocates to focus on friendlier states like Vermont and Massachusetts.
From Clinton’s perspective, there was no upside - politically, or practically - to a veto. And heck, he was raised Baptist - he himself may not have been ready for gay marriage at the time. Few non-gay people were, even that recently.
In retrospect, I don’t think it was that big of a change of heart. One thing to remember is at the time, the push had been for civil unions which was supposed to be exactly like marriage … but for gays. There were many people–including, likely, Clinton–who opposed gay marriage but had little problem with civil unions. However, civil unions quickly came to be seen as an unacceptable “separate but equal” compromise and the campaign for actual gay marriage went into full gear. A lot of people who had supported civil unions probably realized there were just slight semantic differences between the terms and backed gay marriage.
IT still seems to me that Democrats lost a lot of courage over the decades. LBJ was willing to lose an election to pass a huge civil rights bill. Imagine if an ANTI-civil rights bill had reached his desk in 1964. No way he would have signed it. Clinton was in a much easier position than LBJ yet chose the coward’s way out.
EVen now, Democrats have lagged public opinion on the issue, not been in front of it. Forget 20 years, let’s talk TWO years. They waited for the tide to turn before committing themselves, rather than leading.
Or, it could be that Clinton actually opposed gay marriage in 1996 and had a change of heart later.
Or, most likely, very few politicians give a damn about the issue one way or the other except as it affects their careers, and so their opinion is informed by their pollsters. And that’s probably true for Clinton as well. His wife does want to avoid losing another primary to someone attacking her from the left again.
I think all I feel like saying in response to that sad effort is this: one of the two major parties has this issue right and one doesn’t. The end.
What is the courage *your *party has displayed on this topic, adaher?
What have they done that makes you think they have the right position, either morally *or *politically?
What is it that makes you so proud of the Children’s Party and so disdainful of the Grownups’ Party?
As opposed to the Republican Party, which has been actively building and advocating for seawalls to prevent that tide from coming in. Modern Democrats lack backbone, sure, but at least they eventually do the right thing. Modern Republicans, on the other hand, officially think gay people should shut the fuck up and go back into the closet, if not that they should still be arrested and jailed (or executed…I’m going to make a WAG here and guess that every single American who believes that happens to be Republican).
I didn’t realize that support for gay marriage is now the official Democratic position. I’d like to ask Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, and Bruce Braley about that. Wouldn’t you love to hear that answer too?
The Republicans represent the 40-50% of the country that opposes gay marriage. Even when Democrats had a base to cater to on the issue, they didn’t. The Republicans are being entirely consistent. The Democrats are the opportunists here. Except in red states of course, where their threatened candidates will have wide latitutude to avoid the question or even vehemently agree with the Republican position.
Democrats will sell out any constituency to stay in power. Fortunately, most of those constituencies are willing to go along, and as DOMA showed, gays especially don’t mind being a punching bag for Democrats.
Here;s what Landrieu and Pryor most recently had to say on the issue:
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/09/mark_pryor_i_still_oppose_gay_marriage/
Smell the courage! And Democrats will fully support their reelection despite their “hateful and bigoted” views.