Oh ok well I can see the point you were making on the mudding the wates part. It sort of like how they pushed opening combat jobs to female. They just said so we are doing this now without providing any specific details on how.

No one was getting gay-married back then, but Christian conservatives saw the writing on the cultural wall and started pushing for a Constitutional amendment that would have kept it that way. DOMA is odious in hindsight, but at the time it was the best way to pull the rug out from under the national movement. It’s a…

You understand that 8 years later, a Republican president actively ran on a platform of “run to the polls so you can vote against the gays!” and won, right?

Well done.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Yes, Obama carried these things the last 10 yards, but he wouldn’t have been able to score without Clinton’s work throughout the 90's.

So long punk

DADT didn’t muddy the waters as you say, it was meant as a stepping stone and it accomplished it’s job. Clinton didn’t have the political backing to fully support openly gay miltary members. Hell at the time gay rights was a diversionary subject and anything having to do with it brought very vocal opinions.

Oh yes. Bill Clinton, in his last year in office, after 8 years of relentless attack from Republicans, having just come out of the first impeachment proceedings in over a century, wielded his “tremendous” influence to make democrats in Congress vote for a banking bill that the Republicans had been trying to get passed…

Sadly, POTUS has said that he wouldn’t be interested in a seat on SCOTUS. Perhaps after eight years cloistered in the White House, he wants to be free of constraints. Perhaps some day he will change his mind, because I think Barack Obama would be one of the truly great justices. Like his time as president. I am really…

This. Sometimes I feel like the only one who remembers any of this or anything else political from the 1990s. Thank you for showing I am not alone. Now if somebody else actually remembered or learned what Reagan did . . . .

What exactly was he supposed to say? I am signing this horrible republican backed bill, as part of a budget compromise that will fund the last bits of my agenda as I hand over the office to an idiot?

Yes, even I have to back up Clinton on this one. DADT was a comprimise that was still step forward. In 90s, especially before Ellen, Will & Grace (and a few others) there was no way the public was prepared on such significant change. Now every show has a gay character, something that was very unusual in 90s.

For me that person is Madonna, and that’s why I’ll always adore her, no matter how ridiculous she becomes. Being a gay teenager in the 80's, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the gay panic it created wasn’t easy. To have somebody as big as Madonna being a HUGE advocate for AIDS and celebrating gay people the way…

I’m not just old enough to remember the huge cultural shift that came after her coming out... I’m old enough to remember how huge of an advancement Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was when it happened. The world has progressed by leaps and bounds just during my lifetime and I feel privileged to have been here to witness it.

No because Hillary is responsible for everything her husband did while president. I mean, as long as it’s bad and easy to use against her...

I don’t care for Bill Clinton, but DADT was about as much as he could do back then. Had he ended the ban AND said everyone should come out in the military, it would have been a very bad outcome given the mindset then. Things have changed, but gradually.

Only one Clinton did DOMA, President Clinton.

While I agree that Ellen has done more, you're ignoring the fact that Obama appointed Sotomayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court. Without them, or worse, with two more conservative judges in their places, you would have seen a very different outcome.

“He pushed the repeal of DADT through (thanks Clintons!)“

Not to detract from your general point, but this is a really bad understanding of the nature of presidencies. In 1992 Bill Clinton directly campaigned on totally ending the ban on gays in the military, along with a universal health care plan. When universal…

No, really, thanks Obama. Please don’t go.