A review of thousands of documents from the Clinton Presidential Library was unable to substantiate Hillary Clinton’s claim that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was an attempt to forestall a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage.
{mosads}The analysis, conducted by BuzzFeed News, examined a wide variety of documents from the Clinton White House, including correspondence between the administration and Justice Department officials, and found no evidence that DOMA was motivated by pro-gay sentiment.
President Clinton told an audience in 2009 that he signed the legislation in order “to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states.”
Hillary Clinton has reiterated the claim on the campaign trail recently, calling DOMA, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman for federal purposes, a “defensive action” for gay couples.
“On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband and I believed — and there was certainly evidence to support it — is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States, and that there had to be some way to stop that,” Clinton said last week.
But when reporters exhumed thousands of White House documents surrounding the bill’s passage in 1996, they could find no mention of the motive.
Memos between President Clinton and administration officials framing his stance on gay marriage note that he did not “personally support gay marriage.”
“The institutions of traditional marriage and family face tremendous pressures in today’s society,” one memo reviewed and approved by the president said. “We must do everything we can to support and strengthen these institutions.”
Marsha Scott, the gay and lesbian liaison to the administration, wrote to a White House staffer that Clinton’s intention to sign DOMA into law was “a clear and calculated sign from the White House that we are abandoning the gay and lesbian constituencies.”
In a statement issued after he signed the bill, Clinton said he “strenuously opposed discrimination of any kind” but noted that he had “long opposed government recognition of same-gender marriages.”
The Supreme Court struck down parts of DOMA in the landmark 2013 case United States v. Windsor. It created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage two years later in Obergfell v. Hodges, striking down state laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman.