A long-time friend of Bill Clinton said the former president once confided in him about Hillary's "general discomfort" around homosexual activists.
Taylor Branch interviewed the former president dozens of times during his tenure in the White House. A tape recording obtained by the Washington Free Beacon after one such interview details a version of Mrs. Clinton drastically at odds with her 2015 public persona.
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“[Bill] came in and he said, ‘You know I’ve had much more contact in my life with gay people than Hillary has,'" Branch said June 10, 1999, during Clinton's 200 Senate race, the Free Beacon reported. "He said, 'I think she’s really a little put off by some of this stuff.'"
Then-President Clinton allegedly told Branch how his wife struggled with the concept of same-sex marriage and "gay people who were kind of acting out."
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"Hillary, emotionally speaking, still finds the issue harder to swallow than I do, and that it could be difficult for her in New York politics, how far she’ll be asked to go," then-President Clinton allegedly told Branch, the Free Beacon reported.
The conversation with Branch took place immediately after Bill Clinton paused an interview to speak with his wife.
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President Clinton also mentioned his decision sign the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, in 1996. The bill allowed states to pass laws restricting same-sex marriage. He would eventually call his own bill unconstitutional.
"DOMA will come before the Supreme Court, and the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution," Clinton wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post March 7, 2013. "I join with the Obama administration, the petitioner Edith Windsor, and the many other dedicated men and women who have engaged in this struggle for decades in urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act."
Branch's audio recordings made after speaking with Clinton detailed how Hillary had a "conservative religious temperament" on LGBT issues that was incompatible with much of the movement's public policy agenda.
"Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman," Mrs. Clinton said in 2000.
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Then-Sen. Clinton said in 2004 from the New York Senate floor: “Marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman."
The former secretary of state came out in support of same-sex marriage in 2013.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to the Washington Free Beacon's request for comment.
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