DOMA is Unconstitutional
With the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments soon on whether the "Defense of Marriage Act" is unconstitutional, former President Bill Clinton has written a timely statement calling for the overturn of DOMA, a bill he signed into law:
Americans have been at this sort of a crossroads often enough to recognize the right path. We understand that, while our laws may at times lag behind our best natures, in the end they catch up to our core values. One hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln concluded a message to Congress by posing the very question we face today: “It is not ‘Can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘Can we all do better?’ ”
The answer is of course and always yes. In that spirit, I join with the Obama administration, the petitioner Edith Windsor, and the many other dedicated men and women who have engaged in this struggle for decades in urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.
[Bill Clinton, "It's Time to Overturn DOMA", Washington Post, 8 March 2013.]
What a nice thing to see Bill Clinton's very public proclamation that DOMA is unconstitutionally discriminatory and should be overturned. It's also causing a very lively discussion about his motivations and excuses for signing it in 1996. That discussion seems healthy enough to me.
As everyone hastens to point out: it was a very different political landscape that LGBT people faced in 1996 and, as Clinton supporters point also point out, when he signed DOMA is had absolutely no effect — then, since same-sex marriage was nowhere legal. It loomed on the horizon, however, and it wasn't long before Massachusetts tipped over the first domino. Of course, DOMA has serious consequences now.
Clinton knew it was discriminatory then, he knows it now, and calling for it to be overturned is the right thing to do. Should he have signed it at the time? Probably. It was a political calculation. He tried in difficult times to be an LGBT ally, but vetoing DOMA, it was thought in the White House, would certainly scuttle his reelection chances, and they might have been correct. It may well have been more important for him to be reelected than to make what would have been at the time a relatively ineffective gesture.
That doesn't make it any more right, really; it's a question of whether he would have been a hero or a martyr, and a martyr might not have been so useful. Still, that doesn't make it a good thing to have done at the time, even if it was the less bad of bad choices.
I've seen Andrew Sullivan quoted (here, for instance) as saying that if we can forgive Ken Mehlman (former RNC chair during Bush II years and architect of a reelection campaign that relied on vilifying LGBT people) we can forgive Clinton. Well, I don't know who this "we" is! I haven't forgiven Mehlman who, although he has somewhat recently become an avid supporter of marriage equality, has a long, long way to go to come close to atoning for some small amount of the evil he did.
And I don't forgive Clinton for signing DOMA. It was bad, even if it seemed necessary. And while it doesn't erase that sin, this strong, public statement that DOMA must go is a seriously good thing to have done.