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  • 2016-10-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Hillary Clinton Still Secretly Oppose Marriage Equality? (en)
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  • In October 2016, the WikiLeaks web site began publishing The Podesta Emails, an archive of e-correspondence to and from John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Among the messages in that dump was an e-mail chain that purportedly revealed Hillary Clinton privately opposes same-sex marriage despite publicly embracing it in 2013: In a WikiLeaks-revealed chain of messages in which staffers addressed Hillary Clinton's then-relatively recent reversal of position on LGBT rights, Clinton campaign operative Dan Scherwin stated the following: Viewed in isolation, the passage suggested Hillary Clinton (along with her husband Bill) believe[d] in opposing same-sex marriage. But the chain of e-mails was a long one, and the believe portion didn't pertain to her core beliefs surrounding the same-sex marriage issue. Earlier in the e-mail chain, Clinton campaign operatives quoted an extensive passage from a 2013 op-ed written by former President Bill Clinton on the subject of repealing the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Bill Clinton himself had signed the DOMA into law, an act he later justified (as expressed in the op-ed) as one necessary to head off efforts to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage: Hillary Clinton herself said much the same thing about the necessity of her husband's reluctantly signing the DOMA in order to prevent a less desirable outcome: Thus Dan Scherwin's writing about what [Hillary Clinton] and her husband believe and have repeated ... many times is a reference to the Clintons' subsequent claim that DOMA was a necessary evil to head off an in-progress effort to pass a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. But as other staffers noted, the Clintons were wrong about that timing — the constitutional amendment issue didn't arise until years after Bill Clinton signed the DOMA into law: So, various staffers concluded, since Hillary Clinton was unlikely to either disavow or correct her (and her husband's) claim that DOMA was needed to preclude the imminent passage of a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage (she's not going to want to say she was wrong about that given she and her husband believe it and have repeated it many times), a better approach to would be to get her to talk about how her views on the same-sex marriage issue have changed over time, and how she supported efforts to have the DOMA declared unconstitutional (better to reiterate evolution, opposition to DOMA when court considered it, and forward looking stance) While it's true Hillary Clinton didn't publicly reverse her position on same-sex marriage until 2013, the belief questioned above was her assertion that DOMA was necessary to prevent a more restrictive constitutional amendment limiting same-sex marriage, not a belief in opposition to marriage equality. No part of the e-mail chain referenced here supports the notion that Hillary Clinton continued to privately oppose same-sex marriage despite her public-facing support for it. (en)
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