Florida’s HotSpots magazine scored an exclusive interview with presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and reporter Mike Halterman asked her about her “evolution” on marriage equality.
While Clinton was one of the last major Democratic politicians to announce she had changed her views on same-sex marriage, and has regularly been accused of pandering for LGBT votes after being cagey about the subject for years, Halterman managed to get Clinton to open up about her inspiration.
“My views have been shaped by people I know and love. Two of my parents’ closest friends in Little Rock were their next-door neighbors, Dillard and Larry. They visited my father in the hospital at the end of his life,” Clinton told the magazine. “They’re a loving and committed couple. And I came to realize just how deep an injustice it was that they couldn’t be legally married. Dillard and Larry helped shape my views. I’m grateful to the advocates, families and friends who never stopped insisting that what’s right is right. They helped change my mind, and I’m very glad they did.”
In a terse and antagonistic interview with NPR’s Terry Gross in 2014, Clinton defended her “evolution” on marriage equality and pushed back at Gross’s insinuation that political machinations were behind her change of heart.
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“I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I don’t think you did either,” Clinton told Gross. “This was an incredibly new and important idea that people on the front lines of the gay right movement began to talk about and slowly, but surely, convinced others about the rightness of that position,” she added. “When I was ready to say what I said, I said it.”
For more of Clinton’s interview with HotSpots, head over to their website.