Former President Bill Clinton Endorses Gay Marriage

Former President Bill Clinton publicly endorsed gay marriage  at an address to the Campus Progress National Conference in Washington, D.C. , according to The Advocate.

Clinton told The Nation "I personally support people doing what they want to do. I think it's wrong for someone to stop someone else from doing that [gay marriage]."

This marks quite departure from his original position being the President who signed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the law that defines marriage as a heterosexual union for the federal government, and the 1993 law that bans gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military, also known as "don't ask, don't tell."

Although five senators - Patrick Leahy, Christopher Dodd, Kirsten Gillibrand, Charles Schumer and Tom Harkin - have publicly flipped in support of gay marriage this year, Clinton is the highest-profile Democrat to reverse course on the issue yet.

Meanwhile President Obama and his administration who had promised to repeal DOMA,  continue to defend the law in court.

About the fight in Congress over DOMA, Clinton stated: "I think what happened in the Congress was that a lot of people who didn't want to be antigay didn't feel that they should be saying that as a matter of law, without regard to what various churches or religions or others thought, that the United States policy was that all unions that call themselves marriages are, as a matter of law, marriages. I don't think we're there yet. But I think that what we ought to do is to get the legal rights straightened out and let time take its course, and we'll see what happens."