Hillary Clinton at Democratic forum: fight for LGBT equality not over

Responding to the vote in Houston this week to repeal an equal rights ordinance, Hillary Clinton said at the Democratic candidate forum on Friday that the fight for LGBT equality was far from over.

“People can get married on Saturday and fired on Monday,” she told moderator and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, calling nondiscrimination protections for gay and lesbian Americans the “next” fight after marriage equality.

Voters rejected the Houston nondiscrimination law 61% to 39% after a campaign that focused on which bathrooms transgender people use.

“What the far right did very successfully is really to engender a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety and create this backlash against the ordinance,” Clinton said.

“I think this is a reminder that if you stand for equal rights, if you stand against discrimination, you don’t just do it once and you’re done,” she added. “You’ve got to keep fighting for it and you’ve got to keep standing for it.”

One answer Clinton gave that might make LGBT activists less happy was her defense of President Bill Clinton’s support of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1993. Clinton said her husband supported the bill, which prevented the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage, to head off a constitutional amendment banning the practice altogether. A fear of an amendment came up in “private discussions,” she said.

There’s no evidence from Bill Clinton’s papers to support that claim, BuzzFeed News reported last week.