We all seem to have come down with some huge case of collective amnesia when it comes to the political climate that existed in the 1980s and 90s. One can’t fight for equality in Congress if one can’t get elected to Congress, after all. He has never had to consider practicality in his positions. Bernie Sanders could afford to support our community because he was elected from Vermont, one of the five most liberal states in the entire country. Sorry, Sanders supporters, some of us are old enough to remember the Clinton Aromaeus: That’s a very disingenuous question. Once again, Sanders cast a vote for ideological purity ambivalent to the fact that it could have doomed marriage equality in this country. It was far better to pass a federal law that does not comport with the constitution and would eventually be struck down by the courts, then to fight the law with no chance of being able to defeat it, and risk a federal constitutional amendment which would prohibit same-sex marriage for all time. At the time, there was enough votes to amend the federal constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, so when DOMA was proposed by Republicans with a veto-proof majority in 1996, it was a tactical decision by Clinton to sign the legislation into law. After the Hawaii State Supreme Court found the refusal of the state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples discriminatory in 1993, conservatives were concerned that the full-faith and credit clause of the constitution would ensure that same-sex marriage would spread from Hawaii to the entire country. So which is it? Why are you contradicting him?Ĥ. He has since walked back his statement, and said that they are not “establishment” after all, yet his supporters continue to cling to his original statement. He did not label it “establishment” because of his breadth of knowledge of the LGBT movement, but because it is his and his supporters’ go-to debate tactic and talking point. Each time Sanders has spoken of the organization, he could not even properly name it. He cast his symbolic vote and left them to languish under the existing rules. Sanders’ ideological purity on the issue was the enemy of incremental progress and did nothing to help the gay and lesbian people who were serving at the time. It was the first step to allowing LGBT people to serve openly. If he could not change the rule that made homosexuality incompatible with military service, he could at least make it impermissible to identify who is gay, thereby allowing gays and lesbians to serve.
The purpose was to prevent gay and lesbian service members from being discharged by making it impermissible to ask if someone is gay or to tell if someone is gay. When Republican opposition prevented that, DADT was drafted as a compromise. Clinton originally advocated for the repeal of the prohibition against homosexuals serving in the military. Sanders began his political career in 1971 (see here).More disingenuous garbage from Rob Smith.ġ. In March 1969, his son Levi Sanders was born, also in Vermont, making Bernie a new father to a three-month-old at the age of 27 at the time of Stonewall.
The Senator has been outspoken in his support for LGBT+ rights in the past (see here). The patrons of the Stonewall had had enough, and they fought back (a look back available on here).īy the 1960’s, Bernie Sanders had moved to Vermont full-time (see here), where he began writing about revolutionary thought against the establishment, contributing to a paper called the Vermont Freeman (see here). Police also suspected the bar’s management was blackmailing wealthy customers by threatening to out them as gay. But police also abused the patrons as they had done to gays many times before.
On June 28, 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, ostensibly to bust an illegal Mafia-owned establishment selling watered-down liquor without a license. The riots happened in the spirit of 1969, when protests against the war in Vietnam coincided with the African-American, Latino and women’s rights movements. The Stonewall uprising (more here) was a rebellion against the police raid of a New York City gay bar 50 years ago. Reuters was unable to verify if the original photo was part of a company’s marketing campaign or organically posted online. The photograph is a black and white version of a colour photo that has been used in multiple memes in recent years (examples here, here and here) – the oldest we could find was 2015.