There's a lot of buzz about Hillary Clinton's Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, one of her first appearances to discuss her new memoir. The moment that's getting attention is when Gross presses her hard to, in effect, admit that she secretly supported gay marriage all along, before her announcement last year, after leaving the State Department, that she had changed her mind.
In my view, Clinton was quite right to push back. I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of her account of her evolution. As she points out, lots of people have changed their mind about gay marriage. Gross did seem oddly preoccupied with the issue.
What bothered me, instead, was something else Clinton said, just before the conversation got heated:
"There was a very concerted effort to make it even more difficult and greater discrimination, and what DOMA did is at least allow the states to act. It wasn’t going yet to be recognized by the federal government, but at the state level there was the opportunity, and my husband was the first to say that the political circumstances, the threats that were trying to be alleviated by the passage of DOMA, thankfully were no longer so preeminent."
There are two problems here. First, saying that DOMA's effect was to "allow the states to act" is, frankly, extremely weird. DOMA restricted, and did not in any way expand, the powers of the states. Does she simply mean that the law didn't amend the US constitution to forbid states legalizing gay marriage? If so, that's ridiculous. (Imagine claiming that in abolishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee at the end of WWII, the federal government "at least allowed the states to act" to ban racial discrimination in the workplace.)
Second, in her next sentence, she hints at something she explicitly and repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail in 2008: that Bill Clinton signed DOMA in order to prevent passage of a federal antigay constitutional amendment. (NPR summarizes her claim on Fresh Air like this: "DOMA was a compromise whose aim was in part to prevent even more discriminatory laws from passing Congress.")
The problem with this is that it's not true: there was no public discussion at all in the '90s about amending the U.S. constitution (or if there was, it was too marginal to be reported in the New York Times or Washington Post). It can't be the reason he signed it in 1996.
Hillary can legitimately claim a strong track record on LGBT issues as a public servant. I've long since forgiven Clinton for having a weaker position on DOMA repeal than Obama did in 2008 (she said she wanted to repeal Section 3, but keep the rest). So why is she distorting what happened, projecting backward in time the 2005-06 congressional debate over the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment so as to claim that DOMA prevented its passage?
Bill Clinton obviously didn't like signing DOMA (although he did run radio ads in the South taking credit for it). It's obvious why he did it: he was running for reelection. Let's not pretend there was a noble ulterior motive. The same-sex couples who were hurt by the law deserve better.