Don't Ask Hillary About Gay Rights -- She Won't Tell

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted March 14, 2007.

When the story about General Peter Pace ripping the "immorality" of homosexuals broke last week, I didn't even bother to read below the headlines at first. Another bigot with stars gets too near a microphone and shoves his foot in the mouth -- ho hum. Where's the news there? The army isn't exactly a breeding ground for progressive social engineers, nor should it be, probably. Would you be interested in Dennis Kucinich's reviews of military hardware? I'm taking my views on the M-224 Whiskey Pete phosphorus mortar directly to the American people! Absurd, right? Well, then, why listen to some iron-headed Pentagon pol on the subject of gender tolerance?

The only thing that was really interesting about the story, from where I sat, was the reaction to it. A wave of politicians on both sides of the aisle came out and stated the obvious -- look, this "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy is ridiculous, it doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense anymore, let's junk it. Former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson wrote a piece blasting the policy, and the Washington Post, which has a habit of tiptoeing up to the right point of view about a decade late on things like this, wrote a surprisingly fierce editorial in support of the rights of gays to serve. It was beginning to look like Pace's outburst might serve as one of those unifying cultural catalysts, a fuck-up egregious enough to rally the Washington mob into a reluctant consensus.

Then I saw Hillary Clinton's comments.

Hillary was talking to ABC's Jake Tapper about a wide range of issues, mostly about the firings of the Attorneys General, an issue that is somewhat difficult for her to jump on with both high heels because of her husband's mass firing of AGs in 1993. But toward the end of the interview she hit on the Pace story, and the first half of her comments seemed to fall under the category of standard-issue, "I'm for whatever everyone else is for" politico-blather.

"General Pace has clarified his remarks, but let's not lose sight of the fact that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is not working," she said. "We are being deprived of thousands of patriotic men and women who want to serve their country who are bringing skills into the armed services that we desperately need, like translation skills. And one can argue whether it was a good idea when it was first implemented, but we know have evidence as to the fact that we are in a time of war -- when we really need as many people as we can to recruit and retain in an all-volunteer army -- we are turning people away or discharging them not because of what they've done but because of who they are."

This whole line of thinking is vaguely annoying, of course -- the idea that suddenly "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is bad policy because we need everyone we can get to fight this asinine war we're fighting. We fucked up so badly, we should even take fags now! Still, within that comment Hillary managed to call gays and lesbians "patriotic," and she also seemed to come down quite unequivocally on the right side of the nature-nurture question about homosexuality, making sure to identify homosexuality as "who you are," not "who you choose to be." With that statement alone, she basically alienates every born-again Christian in the country. Which makes it all the stranger that, when Tapper asked her if homosexuality was "immoral," she answered as follows:

"Well I'm going to leave that to others to conclude," she said. "I'm very proud of the gays and lesbians I know who perform work that is essential to our country, who want to serve their country and I want make sure they can."

Let me get this straight. Hillary Clinton wants the most powerful office in the world, but she can't make her own decision about the morality of homosexuality? She's got to "leave that to others?"

When I read this, I thought to myself: man, this woman has been living with Bill Clinton way too long. Fifteen years after the 1992 campaign, she's trying to smoke the gay pipe without inhaling. She's just said that homosexuality isn't a choice, that it's something "you are" at birth. If that's what she believes, how could she possibly believe homosexuality is immoral? And if that is what she believes, how could she possibly not answer that question forthrightly? How could she duck Tapper's question there?

There are times, of course, when a politician may be excused for not answering a sticky political question. As the flap over Barack Obama's views about Palestine proved this week, people are not always rational and/or forgiving in the face of political candor. If an Obama can't make a simple declarative factual statement about the suffering of the Palestinian people without being gored on the AIPAC trident and whaled on in a host of heated talk-show segments, it's hard to blame some politicians for keeping their mouths shut when politically controversial topics arise.

But this question, the homosexuality question, this is different. We all know that we live in an era where politicians navigate whole careers in a sort of moral fog, with their eyes closed, using polls as instruments. We know that in most cases, when a politicians expresses an opinion on a controversial topic, he's most likely parroting our own views back to us, views that he discerned using paid cultural snoops like Zogby. Thus ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a politician's words are indistinguishable, from a marketing standpoint, from candy-bar wrappers. They test colors and fonts with focus groups, pick the one that gets the best numbers, and put it out there to see if it can beat Snickers.

See more stories tagged with: election08, hillary clinton

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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