Flaming Politics video blog (Episode 2): Gay Marriagepalooza!

Hi Japhy,

I enjoyed your video. However, I did not fully understand how you characterized Obama's leadership style as opposed to Hillary's. Could you clarify that?

If By Gay You Mean Totally Freaking Awesome, The Yeah, I Guess It's Pretty Gay

--Des Ark

The information on gay marriage was well presented as was the ideological flipping. I got lost on the intent of the quote of Scott McCoy, but I am sure it must be me missing it so a clariffication would be welcomed. 

The only thing that felt tired was more 2 for 1 anti-Clinton commentary. The difference is that the tone here is even more elevated towards Hillary and quite tame with Obama. I see more similarities than differences between Obama and Hillary and  when it comes to gay issues, they both disappoint. With regard to other issues of interest to me, Hillary only has a marginal advantage: A street fighter second to none and that does matter after the humiliating loses by Gore and Kerry.

Hillary rationalizes DOMA (now) as having been to avert a Constitutional Amendment.  At the time, Bill rationalized it as saying that his Christian faith didn't support the idea of marriage between people of the same-sex.  Of course, Bill's faith (Southern Baptist) also doesn't support adultery but somehow he managed to rationalize that...

It has been widely suggested that despite being a Democrat Hillary is actually a Center-Right politician, which in general I would agree with.  Also, the Clinton's have historically shown that they will back down from any fight to advance gay rights if they feel it threatens the rest of their agenda.  Bill offered up DADT as a "compromise" when the military and their conservative backers dug in their opposition to repealing the ban on gay servicemembers.  They then took DADT and used it almost vindictively to pursue closeted gays in the armed forces.

Bill signed DOMA at a time when he himself was under siege and needed to deflect claims that he was an extreme liberal.  In doing so he hoped to neutralize some of the animosity religious conservatives held towards him (unsuccessfully it must be said).

They did maintain a strong gay outreach and had a liason to the gay community.  But they tended to back away from serious fights over gay rights and a lot of their support was largely symbolic in nature (recognition of Gay Pride and things like that).  It is notable that a lot of anti-gay policies lurking in federal agencies were not addressed in any lasting way during the Clinton Administration.  For example, the lack of any support or benefits to same-sex partners of the Diplomatic Corps, which has been given attention by the resignation of Michael Guest, was never resolved under Clinton, and Bush certainly wasn't going to do anything about it.

In terms of gains made by the LGBT community during the Clinton Administration, I think that more of the credit belongs to us rather than to the Clinton's.  While they certainly didn't oppose gay rights and did give tepid support to us, they were never willing to take on serious confrontation with conservatives over the matter.  DADT and DOMA are just the most glaring cases of capitulation.

While I do agree that the Clinton's are friendly to the gay community, I would not argue that they're strong supporters of us.  Hillary is happy for gay money and votes and will gladly appear at the NYC Pride Parade.  But I don't know that she would sacrifice any percentage points in opinion polls for us and that makes me rather ambivalent about her.

Granted, we don't know enough about Obama to truly know what he'll do either.  But at present I am inclined to consider him at least equal to Hillary on the issue of gay rights and therefore am not going to favor her under the presumption that she's a more gay-friendly candidate.  And given that I'm not wild about the rest of her politics she's currently running behind Obama in my book.  We'll see what happens between now and 4/22.