Freedom to Marry and Out-Serve-SLDN has been releasing powerful and informative video's of the impact of DOMA on individual lives around the country. This video is about Major Shannon McLaughlin, her wife Casey and their twins. The impact of DOMA is real and painful for them.
Take a minute to honor them by watching this video.
The Advocate's Managing Editor Neal Broverman wrote an op-ed on President Clinton's speech to the GLAAD Dinner. He was sadden that the President chose to not mention either DOMA and DADT and as result missed a 'teachable moment'.
Here is an excerpt:
Clinton’s ability to “feel your pain” separated him from the rarefied Bushes and Reagans, helping him keep his popularity through countless scandals and snafus. That compassion, though, was sorely missing Saturday night, when the 42nd president received GLAAD’s Advocate for Change Award in Los Angeles.
The president got the award, ostensibly, for his efforts to bring marriage equality to New York State, for recording messages urging North Carolinians to reject the antigay Amendment One, and for condemning two bills he signed into law: “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which barred out gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces, and the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition to same-sex marriages.
It was a calculated and clever gamble for GLAAD to give Clinton the award. Firstly, inviting a president, especially one as beloved as Clinton, would undoubtedly get mucho media attention while snagging the biggest stars in the universe (including motion picture power player Harvey Weinstein and Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence who introduced Clinton's speech). The organization might have also thought the L.A. event could become a history-making moment, offering a forum for Clinton to take responsibility for these odious laws and provide context on why he signed them. Maybe he could share the regret he lived with back then, or possibly still lives with. We all know the world was different in the ’90s. But that podium — in front of an audience that wondered, like that woman at the town hall did, whether he’d been personally affected — was the perfect place for Clinton to share some perspective on DADT and DOMA and how things went awry.
Yes, Clinton already called for the Supreme Court, currently weighing the constitutionality of DOMA, to strike down the law in a Washington Post op-ed last month. “Although that was only 17 years ago, it was a very different time,” he wrote in his second sentence. He provides some context to how the bill came about and calls it “blatant discrimination.” On Saturday, I and many others in the audience yearned for Clinton to reiterate that kind of explanation, to show some emotion that can’t be read off a laptop. That desire is modest compared to what others want from the former president. “As welcome as Clinton’s words are, there are two that are conspicuously absent: I’m sorry,” Post columnist Jonathan Capehart wrote after the op-ed’s publication. “Sorry for signing the bill. Sorry for crowing about it in radio ads on Christian radio stations during his ’96 reelection campaign. Sorry for the harm it has caused same-sex couples and the income inequality it exacerbates.”
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