Pres.Clinton First President to Publicly Ask for Gay Rights
Getting a line tucked into a presidential speech is no small feat. Speeches are vetted by policy and political aides, cabinet members, outside groups and, of course, the president himself, all of whom have strong ideas about how the text should read.
In 1996, then White House aide Richard Socarides wanted President Bill Clinton to include a line his Democratic convention address making clear that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was unacceptable.
Mr. Socarides wrote an internal memo tallying the number of “openly gay and lesbian people who will have official roles at the convention” (180 by his count) and urging that the words “gays and lesbian” appear “somewhere in the speech.”
“Four years ago in New York City, the president included similar language in his remarks,” Mr. Socarides wrote. “Not to do so four years later would be widely noticed and would create real anger and disappointment among gays and lesbians attending the convention.”
The memo was released Friday by the Clinton Presidential Library, along with 2,500 pages of material that had been previously withheld for legal reasons that no longer apply.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Socarides said he had most likely seen an early draft of the speech and discovered that it did not include a reference to gays, prompting him to write the memo.
When Mr. Clinton gave his speech accepting the nomination, he indeed made reference to gays.
“So look around here, look around here: Old or young, healthy as a horse or a person with a disability that hasn’t kept you down, man or woman, Native American, native born, immigrant, straight or gay, whatever, the test ought to be I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence,” Mr. Clinton said.
Mr. Socarides recalls being thrilled Mr. Clinton spoke the word.
“When President Clinton was president, just saying the word ‘gay’ was seen as a transformational moment,” Mr. Socarides said in an interview Friday.
Much has changed since that era. As president, Mr. Clinton signed the law defining marriage as the joining of man and woman. He would later repudiate the Defense of Marriage Act.
In 2012, President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to publicly come out in favor of same sex marriage.
“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well,” Mr. Obama said in his second inaugural address in 2013.
So, how did Mr. Socarides tally the numbers of openly gay folks attending the Democratic convention in 1996?
With a chuckle, he conceded he might have padded the numbers.
”I suspect that I probably stretched these numbers a little bit to make a point,” he said. “I stretched them just a tad.”
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