| Subject: Living History - HRC |
Author:
bm
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Date Posted: 19:49:03 01/09/08 Wed
In reply to:
bm
's message, "The Audacity of Hope" on 20:45:06 01/05/08 Sat
Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York might become the first female president of the USA.
New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton Religious Biography
In Her Own Words:
"Faith gives us a broadly held belief in the importance of basic moral principles: the need to care for each other, the need to protect the vulnerable, to refrain from violence, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us."
The daughter of a Methodist Sunday school teacher, Hillary Rodham Clinton was raised in Park Ridge, Ill., attended Sunday school and vacation Bible school and was active in her church's youth group. She is a lifelong member of the United Methodist Church, the country's largest mainline Protestant denomination. After her marriage to Bill Clinton, a Southern Baptist, she taught Sunday school at First United Methodist in Little Rock, Ark. As First Lady, she regularly attended services at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington.
In her autobiography Living History, Clinton describes her faith as a "crucial, though deeply personal, part of my life and my family's life." Clinton has said that even if she had not been taught by her family to pray, "after I'd been in the White House for a few months, I would have become a praying person." She writes that her faith helped her in the days and weeks following the Monica Lewinsky scandal and President Clinton's 1998 impeachment by the House of Representatives.
Clinton has cited her Methodist background as inspiration to promote faith-based initiatives and other programs aimed at social justice and child welfare. Clinton is currently a member of a Senate prayer group, which counts Republicans and Democrats among its members, including presidential candidate Sam Brownback.
In a 2005 speech, Clinton said that religious political officials should be able to "live out their faith in the public square." During her 2000 Senate campaign, Clinton argued that allowing teachers to post the Ten Commandments in schools was a violation of the constitution.
Clinton has been a longtime advocate of the death penalty. Clinton cosponsored the Innocence Protection Act of 2003 which became law in 2004 as part of the Justice for All Act. The bill provides funding for post-conviction DNA testing and establishes a DNA testing process for individuals sentenced to the death penalty under federal law. As first lady, she lobbied for President Clinton's crime bill, which expanded the list of crimes subject to the federal death penalty.
Clinton opposes vouchers for private schools, instead favoring increased funding for public schools. She says voucher programs exacerbate divisions within communities, and could result in schools that are based on radical religious ideologies. When the Clintons were in the White House, they were criticized for sending daughter Chelsea to a private school while they advocated for public schools.
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Clinton proposes a "strategic energy fund" that would be created with oil-company profits to invest in developing and deploying alternative energy sources. While Clinton has called for increased funding of ethanol research, she has voted against biofuel tax incentives and measures mandating higher levels of ethanol use. She is a member of the Senate committee on Environment & Public Works.
Clinton has articulated support for faith-based programs that address social ills and provide social services, adding that "there is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles." She says that faith-based groups are often the most willing to tackle the difficult problems of the inner cities and venture into violent neighborhoods because instead of seeing "trouble," they "see God's work right in front of them."
Clinton opposes same-sex marriage and favors civil unions but said she would not stand in the way if New York passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. In the U.S. Senate, she opposed amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. While she has solicited and received the support of gay and lesbian groups, many gay activists were alarmed over her March 2007 comment that the morality of homosexuality was up "to others to conclude." She later released a statement saying that she does not believe homosexuality is immoral.
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Clinton proposes a health care plan that she calls ''The American Health Choices Plan," which would require all Americans to acquire health insurance. The plan would expand existing employer-provided health care, while also striving to provide more affordable opportunities for individuals to buy public or private insurance. Health care has been a signature issue for Clinton, who chaired the ultimately unsuccessful National Task Force for Health Care Reform while she was the first lady. She has called universal coverage "a moral and health imperative" and says that she hopes to make health care "the No. 1 voting issue in the 2008 election." In the April 2007 Democratic debate, Clinton said that "we've got to control and decrease costs for everyone" and that the health care problem "is not just about the uninsured."
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Clinton supports comprehensive immigration reform based on strengthening America's borders and implementing new enforcement laws. She advocates providing a path to legal status for undocumented workers already in the U.S. Clinton supports a proposal in New York state to allow undocumented, illegal immigrants to gain U.S. government identification, but she came under fire from her Democratic opponents in an October 2007 debate for appearing to change positions on the issue. In the past, Clinton has used the Bible to criticize a Republican plan to make it a federal crime to offer aid to illegal immigrants, saying the proposed policy "is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scripture because this bill would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself."
While she voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in 2002, Clinton has since said that she "certainly wouldn't have voted" for the war if she had known then what she knows now. Clinton has advocated a phased redeployment of troops to move them out of harm's way, caps on the number of troops sent to Iraq and conditions for the Iraqi government to continue to receive funds. She has gradually moved away from her initial support for the war; in August 2007, Clinton said it was time to focus on "ending this war – not next year, not next month, but today."
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Clinton accuses the Bush administration of turning the middle class into "invisible Americans," and says if she is elected president, "they will no longer be invisible." In 2002, Clinton was criticized by liberal groups for supporting an increase in the work requirement for welfare; she said that she supported the measure because it was tied to $8 billion in funding of day care for welfare recipients. She advocated for welfare reform under her husband's administration. As a senator, Clinton voted for an increase in the federal minimum wage.
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An outspoken supporter of stem cell research, Clinton cosponsored the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005. President Bush vetoed the bill, which would have allowed federal financing of stem cell research on new embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded human embryos originally created for fertility treatments. She has called the ethics of stem cell research "a delicate balancing act."
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