The Pro Hillary Thread

When Clinton started as Secretary of State, in January of 2009, she inherited a department that LGBT staffers had seen as indifferent to their rights during the George W. Bush administration. They grumbled that the department would pay for their pets, but not their partners, to travel to posts around the world. Clinton, on the other hand, signaled immediately her commitment to LGBT issues, setting up meetings—personally or with top staff—with advocacy groups like the Council for Global Equality, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Human Rights Campaign, as well as the in-house organization called Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies. They had long lists of pent-up requests. The Clinton State Department addressed them.

“We were always getting a yes,” Jon Tollefson, a GLIFFA president during Clinton’s tenure, told me, “so we just kept going.”

To LGBT people and advocates, within the State Department and around the country, what Clinton was doing wasn’t a total surprise. The extent of her commitment, though, was a revelation.

In May of 2009, four months after Clinton took over at the State Department, Kerry Eleveld, a reporter for The Advocate, the LGBT newspaper, got a copy of a draft of a letter Clinton had written that was to be sent to GLIFAA employees. “Historically, domestic partners of Foreign Service members have not been provided the same training, benefits, allowances, and protections that other family members receive,” the document said. “These inequities are unfair and must end. … [T]he Department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex domestic partners because it is the right thing to do.”

“She fixed that as soon as she could,” said Michael Guest, a gay career foreign service officer who in 2007 had quit to protest the situation at the State Department in the Bush administration. Obama then put him on the department’s transition team. “It was, like, the first thing she did, so I gained a lot of respect for her.”

Clinton also was the first Secretary of State to give a speech at the State Department’s annual event marking gay pride month. And in 2011, in Geneva, in remarks for International Human Rights Day, and to an audience that included diplomats from countries in Africa and the Middle East with retrograde LGBT rights records, she said, “Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same.”

Judging from back-and-forth in the released emails, Clinton kept up with news of gay rights abuses and violence against LGBT people around the world as well as states and nations moving forward on marriage equality. She even taped an “It Gets Better” video.

But nothing Clinton did on this front was more ahead of its time than the transgender passport policy.

“We had never, and I mean never, had the federal government do a pro-trans policy before,” said Keisling from the national transgender group.

Passports with appropriate gender markers allowed transgender people to travel more safely abroad. But they had a big impact domestically, too: Passports are a legal form of identification everywhere in the U.S., so a new passport rule would enable them to get their ID re-issued even if they lived in red states with conservative legislatures and restrictive driver’s license regulations. It also would have considerable symbolic value: “It says, ‘This proves who I am,’ and it has the seal of the United States on it,” said Rick Garcia, the founder of Equality Illinois and a longtime LGBT activist.

http://www.cnn.com

Is anyone in the Democrat party not corrupt? Does anyone NOT use "incredibly bad judgment."

These are the crooks at the top of the heap. Above the law.

Lash wrote:

http://www.cnn.com

Is anyone in the Democrat party not corrupt? Does anyone NOT use "incredibly bad judgment."

These are the crooks at the top of the heap. Above the law.

Last I knew, Bernie Sanders was running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Guess he's part of the precipitate, not part of the solution.

I know you're uneducated, but you're not that dumb. Don't try to sell that ****.

What's your academic pedigree?