General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Bill Clinton Praises The Demise Of DOMA, Without Mentioning That He Signed It Into Law [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,069 posts)I've spent most of my life interacting with people who can mouth what they know the right thing to be with respect to LGBT issues - with varying degrees of gut knowledge that it really is the right thing. (As well as people who are just blatant bigots and don't care what the right thing is.) In more than three decades you get a pretty good sense of when what is going on in the gut doesn't match the public presentation.
As I noted - the same thing was going on with Edwards, except that he was very honest about it (which didn't win him many friends in the LGBT community).
But there truly has been a palpable change. I stopped listening for a while because it just made me angry. So sometime in the last couple of years, before his announced support of same gender marriage, something really changed at a gut level for him.
He is also a political creature, so the timing of the public announcement of that gut level change may well have been influenced by political considerations. But the kind of advocacy we now see isn't something which is purely political, nor is it something which can be sustained without the kind of gut level change I had sensed (any more than the damaging action and inaction of most of his first term could have been sustained had the change preceded his first term in office).