Hillary Clinton said that President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to define marriage at the federal level as between a man and woman to prevent Republicans from seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage outright.
"On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband believed — and there was certainly evidence to support it — is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States of America, and that there had to be some way to stop that," Clinton told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Friday. "There wasn't any rational argument."
The Maddow interview
was reported by The Daily Caller.
Signed on Sept. 21, 1996, the law also allowed states to refuse to recognize marriages between same-sex couples that were performed in other states.
Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, has shifted her position on gay marriage over the years, the Daily Caller reports, including supporting it after the Supreme Court decision in June.
In the past, Clinton has said that she supported same-sex marriage, the Daily Caller reports, but that states should choose whether to legalize it.
Before that, the former secretary of state said that she backed civil unions.
In the Maddow interview, Clinton said that discussions with the president and his advisers on the Republican constitutional effort were along the lines of: " ' You can't be serious. You can't be serious.' But they were."
"In a lot of ways, DOMA was a line that was drawn that was to prevent going further," Clinton said. "It was a defensive action."
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