Former president Bill
Clinton said in a conference for progressive students that he
supports gay and lesbian couples' right to
marry.
"Yeah,"
Clinton said when asked after a speech at the Campus Progress
National Conference, according to
The Nation
. "I personally support people doing what they want to do.
I think it's wrong for someone to stop someone else from
doing that [same-sex marriage]."
In 1996, Clinton signed
the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned recognition
of same-sex marriages at the federal level
and gave individual states the right to refuse recognition to
such marriages even if performed legally in other
states. He also approved the controversial
"don't ask, don't tell" law, which barred
openly gay personnel from serving in the military.
In a 2000 interview
with
The Advocate
, Clinton said that "people who have a relationship ought
to be able to call it whatever they want. And insofar as
it's sanctified by a religious ceremony, that's up to
the churches involved."
He added about the
fight in Congress over DOMA, "I think what happened in the
Congress was that a lot of people who didn't want to be
antigay didn't feel that they should be saying that as a
matter of law, without regard to what various churches or
religions or others thought, that the United States policy was
that all unions that call themselves marriages are, as a matter
of law, marriages. I don't think we're there yet. But I
think that what we ought to do is to get the legal rights
straightened out and let time take its course, and we'll
see what happens."
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