Last week Hillary, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Senate Democrats' Steering & Outreach Committee, organized a sort of "listening session" for several of her colleagues and about 20 gay rights activists.
There, the Dems were lectured to for not embracing same-sex "marriage" enough, and as such are accused of hurting the gay rights movement. Sure, the Dems wholeheartedly embrace every other hot-button issue (hate crimes, AIDS funding, gays in the military, etc) on the gay agenda, and they even all voted against a constitutional amendment to define marriage as being between one man and one woman, but that is still not enough.
The fact that these senators have said that they support measures like civil unions or domestic partnerships, but reject gay "marriage" is, the activists said, tantamount to the "separate but equal" laws that segregated blacks from whites in the Jim Crow days. The outreach event came only a few weeks after the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York's largest gay rights group, criticized Chairwoman Clinton for not supporting same-sex "marriage." The man who wrote led the anti-contributing charge against Hillary, Alan Van Capelle, was in attendance. No one knows if the two spoke, as Van Capelle and Sen. Clinton's office both declined to comment afterward.
