Former president Bill Clinton said in a conference for progressive students that he supports gay and lesbian couples' right to marry."Yeah," Clinton said when asked after a speech at the Campus Progress National Conference, according to 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 [same-sex marriage]."
In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned recognition of same-sex marriages at the federal level and gave individual states the right to refuse recognition to such marriages even if performed legally in other states. He also approved the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" law, which barred openly gay personnel from serving in the military.
In a 2000 interview with The Advocate, Clinton said that "people who have a relationship ought to be able to call it whatever they want. And insofar as it's sanctified by a religious ceremony, that's up to the churches involved."
He added about the fight in Congress over DOMA, "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."
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