It’s official at last. Hillary Clinton will run for president of the USA. The announcement came yesterday in a video released by her campaign that in typical Hillary style features a diverse group of people making changes in their lives, including a male couple about to be married. A female couple is also included in the video.
Not only does Hillary Clinton support marriage equality, she’s spoken out on the other side of all those arguments. She really consolidated her standing among the LGBT community with a speech she gave before the United Nations in Geneva while Secretary of State in December 2011 in which she said to the world that “Being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.”
Documents released this week by the National Archives at the Clinton Library show it was Hillary Clinton’s staff who pushed during her husband’s presidency for greater acceptance of LGBT people. For example, President Obama signed an executive order last year that went into effect last week banning discrimination in employment by federal contractors — something that Hillary Clinton’s staff pushed her husband to do back in August 2000.
Her candidacy is in great contrast to the two senators who have declared that they are running to be the republican candidate for one of the most powerful jobs in the world. Paul Rand has said that same-sex couples shouldn’t get to use the word marriage because it “offends myself and a lot of people,” whilst the right-wing Ted Cruz went one step further when he publically declared he was against “the radical gay marriage agenda,” then went on to warn his supporters about the gay ‘jihad’ against religious freedom.
Openly gay Robby Mook, a Democratic strategist who ran Terry McAuliffe’s successful 2013 campaign for Governor of Virginia, has been chosen to be Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign Manager.
