Hillary Rodham Clinton Is Not Bill Clinton: GLBTQ Version
2008 April 8
Last post, shorter and issue-specific version:
Hillary Rodham Clinton is not Bill Clinton. Is it so difficult to understand that she is not the same entity as her spouse, and to separate your opinions of Bill Clinton’s positions from your opinions of Hillary Clinton’s positions?
Now that we’re out of the early primary season and sexists have progressed from “He’s running for president, not her–I mean, he’s campaigning for her and everything!” to more specific, “I hate a WJC policy and so I hate HRC for it, too,” I most often see this claim made in reference to DADT and DOMA.
Newsflash: If you want to argue that you hate Hillary Rodham Clinton for DADT, you should consider that she did not pass that bill. Bill Clinton did. If you want to argue that you hate Hillary Rodham Clinton for DOMA, you should consider that she did not pass that bill (yes, I’m aware of her position on it—see below). You should also consider that she has repeatedly come out in support of GLBTQ rights:
In an interview with the Philadelphia Gay News (newspaper-style format here), she committed to improving immigration policy for same-sex couples; leveraging foreign aid in condemning countries that execute people for being gay; ending DADT; extending federal domestic-partner legislation to all LGBT citizens; improving services for GLBT youths. (See Melissa’s post at Shakesville and the comment thread for more discussion.)
On Ellen yesterday, she spoke about ending inequalities for same-sex couples in federal law, and explained how her personal experience with real people has shaped her opinions:
So, my mother, the people who were with her the whole time were the two [gay] neighbors. And, when my father did finally die, it was one of his neighbors who was there with him holding his hand. Well, fast forward. One of the men got sick, and was in the hospital, but because they had no rights, his partner was not allowed in the hospital. And the family of the man who was sick could say, “No, he’s not a member of the family.” They had been together since Vietnam. One was a doctor, one was a nurse. And, all of a sudden, the partner was a non-entity. That made such an impression on me. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure that people like you, and Portia, and other’s have a chance to have rights. To be able to go to the hospital, to inherit property, to make sure that you can list somebody as a beneficiary on an insurance policy. We just have to make this much more fair. — Interview transcript at Hillbuzz
She’s been on record since June 2007 (Planet Out, 2007/06/19) as saying that although DOMA was strategically important for defeating the Federal Marriage Amendment, she believes that “the restrictions imposed by DOMA on federal government recognition of same-sex relationships are unfair.”
She worked with the Human Rights Campaign to defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment:
While introducing the senator, HRC President Joe Solmonese mentioned at least three strategy meetings in which Clinton had convened with the Human Rights Campaign on Capitol Hill to defeat FMA.
…
“It was Senator Clinton who first summoned me to the Hill to talk about our strategy for defeating the federal marriage amendment,” he said.
He said she asked him: “How are we going to make sure the messaging is united, the Senate is united, the community is united and we are going to kill it [the federal marriage amendment] dead?”
“She brought us the Senate to brief people on how to get this done,” Solmonese recalled. “She convened the meeting and she made sure everyone was in line.”
She has spoken about the problems facing GLBTQ youth.
I have problems with some of Senator Clinton’s positions on LGBTQ issues, but in the main, she is not Bill Clinton. Do some research; stop buying into the idea that because Bill Clinton passed DADT and DOMA, she supports them, too; and find legitimate reasons to criticize Hillary Rodham Clinton for that don’t rely on the assumption that she’s an extension of her husband. That thinking is lazy, sloppy, and sexist.
Entry Filed under: 2008, feminism, politics, queer rights. .
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1.
Brave Sir Robin | 2008 April 9 at 5:04 am
I wish YOU were the MSM.
We’d all be better off if out media was plain spoken and truthful.
2.
Brave Sir Robin | 2008 April 9 at 5:05 am
That should be our media.
Not enough coffee yet.
3.
pizzadiavola | 2008 April 9 at 10:32 am
We’d all be better off if out media was plain spoken and truthful.
Too, too right. I mostly read British papers these days, and by and large they’re just better written and better reported than the NYT and the WSJ, and all the infotainment sources (e.g. MSNBC, ABC). So it’s possible for mainstream media sources to be plain spoken and truthful, but they just aren’t, here.
4.
Space Cowboy | 2008 April 9 at 1:37 pm
I mostly read British papers these days
I use my BBC live bookmark all the time in my browser. The reason we cannot count on our media for real news is because it’s not news media; it’s entertainment media.
Everything they do on their programs is for entertainment - the sole purpose of keeping geezers tuned in long enough to watch the commercials that sponsors have paid advertising money for. They even try to make the weather forecast something so suspense-filled that you couldn’t bear to change that channel, lest you miss some important factoid about the current weather.
5.
pizzadiavola | 2008 April 10 at 5:25 pm
Everything they do on their programs is for entertainment
Very good point. Lately I’ve been attributing the degraded quality of infotainment media down to consolidated corporate ownership of most news channels, which shifts the focus of new organizations from informing the people to meeting quarterly projections. I hadn’t made the next logical connection to the importance of how they make revenue, (ads) though, so thanks for bringing that up.
Do you think that print journalism unaffiliated with TV media (so–NYT, WSJ, but not ABC.com or MSNBC.com) is affected in the same ways?
They even try to make the weather forecast something so suspense-filled that you couldn’t bear to change that channel, lest you miss some important factoid about the current weather.
Seriously? Wow.
6.
Space Cowboy | 2008 April 11 at 1:16 pm
Do you think that print journalism unaffiliated with TV media (so–NYT, WSJ, but not ABC.com or MSNBC.com) is affected in the same ways?
I really don’t think they are, though they have their own worries about staying relevant enough to compete with the aforementioned entertainment media. Certainly, blogging has actually helped revive print journalism since there seems to be a desire to go back to the written word. Whether it’s brilliance or shite, there’s something to be said for the effort to compose and to read the expression of thought.
Coming back to the point I started with - print journalism has the easy distractions of the internet and TV/MSM to contend with, which I certainly don’t envy. I’m really hard pressed to want to read about current events when I can just head to cuteoverload or disapprovingrabbits.
Still, there is one thing that print journalism has over entertainment media: While the MSM makes no bones about trying to lure you and keep you where you are, you arrive at the news column you’re reading because that is where you want to be.
7.
pizzadiavola | 2008 April 11 at 1:53 pm
Certainly, blogging has actually helped revive print journalism since there seems to be a desire to go back to the written word.
It’s interesting to see how print journalism & blogging interact. Now that the panic about bloggers usurping print journalism has subsided, as far as I can tell, it seems that more mainstream institutions are getting behind the interactive user community bandwagon–enabling comment boards on articles, adding the digg/facebook/reddit buttons, journalists writing blogs under the umbrella of their newspapers.
While the MSM makes no bones about trying to lure you and keep you where you are, you arrive at the news column you’re reading because that is where you want to be.
One thing I wonder about is what the revenue streams are for newspapers and how they’re staying afloat. I guess the difference in the effects of their advertising practices relates to their different media–with TV, the goal is, as you said, to get the viewer to sit down long enough to watch the commercials, whereas with print or online media, the ads are always present in the sidebars. So the primary lure with online news is the text rather than the ads, although once you’re at the webpage, you can also go look at ads without being distracted. And it’s always possible to come back to articles later, after clicking away through ads, which isn’t the case with TV.