[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 40 (Monday, October 11, 1999)]
[Pages 1969-1974]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at an Empire State Pride Gala in New York City

October 7, 1999

    The President. Thank you very much for your energy and your 
enthusiasm, your passion, and your wonderful welcome. I want to begin by 
thanking Jeff, who has been a wonderful friend and adviser, a prodder 
and supporter to me. And I thank him so much.
    Thank you, Kate Callivan, for your work tonight. Thank you, Matt 
Forman, for your leadership of Empire State Pride. And thank you, Chuck 
Schumer, for running and winning and for all you have done to make this 
a better State and a better country.
    I'd also like to thank two other Members of the Congress who are 
here, Congressman Jerry Nadler and Congressman Anthony Weiner, for the 
work they do for you. Thank you. I'd like to thank my longtime friend, 
the New York public advocate, Mark Green, who is here, for his steadfast 
support of your agenda. Thank you, Mark.
    I understand the borough president of Manhattan is here, Virginia 
Fields. Thank you, Virginia. We're glad to have you. There are members 
of the State Assembly and members of the City Council here. Emily Giske, 
the vice president of the State Democratic Party, is here. I thank her. 
And we've got all these great people from the administration. A lot of 
them stood up, but I want to mention their names--the two highest 
ranking openly gay and lesbian appointees in the house, Sean Maloney and 
Karen Tramontano; my good friend Richard Socarides, who is leaving; Fred 
Hochberg, the Deputy Administrator of SBA; and two former appointees, 
Roberta Eichenberg and Ginny Apuzzo are here. I thank them for what they 
did. I'd also like to thank Marsha Scott, who was my first liaison to 
the gay and lesbian community this year. And the head of our anti-HIV 
and AIDS efforts, Sandy Thurman, who's done a wonderful job this year. I 
thank her for being here.
    Let me begin by saying something I need to say a lot in the time I 
have left as President: Thank you. Thank you for the support, the 
guidance, and the urging you have given to the Vice President and me and 
to our administration and our families. Thank you for the example you 
have set. Thank you for helping Chuck Schumer to get elected. Thank you 
for giving us the opportunity to learn and grow and do our jobs better 
and serve all Americans better.
    Jeff said that, you know, last year the Vice President came, and 
this year Chuck and I are here. And you're looking for a speaker. I 
think, you know, you ought to invite a woman to speak next year. And if 
you want, I have a suggestion. [Laughter]
    Actually I talked, as chance would have it, to both the Vice 
President and to Hillary this afternoon--[laughter]--not so I could tell 
you that I did, either. [Laughter] But they asked me what I was doing--
there's a lot more attention on what they're doing than what I'm doing 
now, but they did ask me what I was doing, which was nice, that someone, 
somewhere in America still cared what I was doing. [Laughter] So when I 
told them what I was doing, they said to give you their best wishes, and 
they wish they were here.
    Jeff mentioned that 7 years ago, when I first ran for President, I 
said I had a vision for America, and you were a part of it. I met with a 
group of activists from your community here in early 1992, and in 
California in late 1991. And I began to try to listen and to learn and 
to understand why so many of these issues have presented such big 
problems for America.
    One couple came through to see me earlier tonight, two men; one was 
from Australia, the other from New Zealand, and they said that as a 
couple, they hadn't the same immigration rights coming into America as 
they did in either Canada or New Zealand. I don't

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think that's right. I think that ought to be changed.
    But I think the first thing I want to say to you--I want to talk 
more about this, but I'm obviously giving a lot of thought these days to 
what happens to America over the long run. We enter a new century; we 
enter a new millennium; the way we work and live and relate to each 
other and relate to people around the world is changing in profound and 
speedy ways. It's almost difficult to grasp. More of it is good than 
bad.
    But we all have to be much more open to each other if we want this 
to work. We've got to learn to listen as well as to talk. We've got to 
learn to feel as well as to think. We have to learn, as we're all told 
we should do from childhood, to stand in the other person's shoes. We 
have done what we could to make the future one of equal opportunity and 
equal responsibility and equal membership in our American community, 
whether it is in fighting to pass the hate crimes law or the 
``Employment Non-Discrimination Act'' or to invest more in research, 
prevention, and treatment for HIV patients.
    I would like to take just a few moments tonight to try to put all 
the things you care about into a larger context of where America is and 
where I hope America will go. When I started running for President, I 
did so because I thought the country was in trouble and without 
direction and growing more divided. First, economically, unemployment 
was too high; job growth was too low; incomes were stagnant; inequality 
was increasing; and there was a sense of literal despair about it in 
many places.
    I worried about social division. You remember, we had a riot in Los 
Angeles. But everywhere, there was this quiet sense of unease. And every 
campaign, it seemed to me, was yet another example of how we could sort 
of carve up the electorate and make one group resent another and hope 
that your group was a larger group of resenters than the other group. 
And it seemed to me that that was a bad way to run a country.
    And it wasn't just anti-lesbian and -gay; it was tensions between 
the races, tensions between immigrants and citizens. And it built on 
this whole pattern of thought that had accumulated in Washington over 
decades that everything had to be divided into hostile camps. You 
couldn't be pro-labor if you were pro-business and vice versa. You 
couldn't be pro-economic growth and be in favor of improving the 
environment. You couldn't be pro-work and pro-family. We had to have 
these divided views. You couldn't have an urban policy if you really 
cared about what was going on on the farm.
    You know, we don't think like that. None of us do, instinctively. We 
always try to think of how we can live an integrated life and how our 
minds will think in an integrated way that pulls things together and 
moves things forward. But everything about our politics was about how to 
pit us against one another.
    And since we all wake up every morning--I know maybe none of you do, 
but some days I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, in a foul humor. 
[Laughter] I'm sure you don't ever do that, but I do sometimes. 
[Laughter] And it has occurred to me really that every one of us has 
this little scale inside, you know. On one side there's the light forces 
and the other side there's the dark forces in our psyche and our makeup 
and the way we look at the world. And every day we wake up and the scale 
is a little bit tilted one way or the other. And life is a big struggle 
to try to keep things in proper balance.
    You don't want to have so much light that you're just a fool for 
whatever comes along. But if the scale tips dark even a little bit, 
things turn badly for people and those with whom they come in contact. 
And it can happen for communities and for a whole country.
    So anyway, when I ran, I thought maybe I could change the way we 
think about politics. And if we do, maybe we can change what we do and 
how we do it.
    And you know, there's an old adage that the Lord never gives you 
more than you can handle, but I have been severely tested in this 
resolve. [Laughter] But most days, you know, it's been kind of fun but 
bewildering. [Laughter]
    So anyway, we came up--Al Gore and I--well, for whatever reason--and 
the American people took a chance on me and Al Gore in 1992. And we got 
the Democrats together, and we tried to reach out to the Republicans.

[[Page 1971]]

And usually they said no; sometimes they said--a few of them would say 
yes.
    But we said, ``Look, let's take a different direction on the 
economy, on crime, on welfare, on the environment. Let's try to think of 
a way to integrate the things that we want to achieve and build a 
creative tension so we could move the country forward. And let's try to 
build a country where everybody has a place.'' And we just made an 
argument in 1992. It was just an argument. You--no one could know for 
sure whether it would work.

[At this point, a cellular telephone rang in the audience.]

    The President. You know, I'm rethinking my position about wanting 
everybody to have a cell phone in this country. [Laughter] He's a good 
guy. Don't worry about it.
    But anyway, so we made this argument, you know, and you guys took a 
chance. And New York really stood behind us, gave us a chance to serve.
    But it's not an argument anymore. Those of you who've been with us 
6\1/2\ years, when you go out to discuss citizenship and issues and the 
future, say, ``Look, whatever you want to say about that crowd, there 
are certain things that you can't dispute. We now have the lowest 
unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the 
lowest crime rates in 26 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, 
the first back-to-back surpluses in 42 years, the longest peacetime 
expansion in history, and 19\1/2\ million new jobs.'' You can't argue; 
that happened.
    And every time--every time--every time we did something that tried 
to reconcile our economic objectives with our other objectives--whether 
it was family and medical leave or vetoing the first two welfare bills 
because they didn't have guaranteed food and medicine coverage for poor 
children and enough money for child care, or trying to clean up the air 
and the water, or saying that the system we had for taking care of 
little kids and immunizing them--we were nuts, and we were determined to 
reach 90 percent immunization, which we did, by the way. All of these 
things--people would say--or raising the minimum wage, or you name it--
that was always going to be something that would hurt the economy. It 
turned out that that was wrong, that putting things together made all of 
our efforts reinforce one another.
    I feel even more strongly about that when it comes to putting people 
together. One of the things I've spent an enormous amount of time doing 
in the last 2 years is trying to make sure America is Y2K ready. I've 
even got these little things that look like beanie babies that are Y2K 
bugs I have around just to remind me that we don't want there to be one.
    You know, to most people, that's about adjusting a computer. But if 
you think about it, there is a lot more than mechanics involved in being 
ready for the new millennium, and a lot more than economics involved in 
being a successful country.
    When I signed the Executive order to prohibit discrimination in the 
Federal work force based on sexual orientation, I thought I was helping 
us to come together. I think ``ENDA'' will help us to come together.
    I think the fact that we have gay and lesbian Americans, like Jim 
Hormel and over 200 other openly gay and lesbian people serving in 
appointed positions in our Government throughout the administration, 
doing normal jobs--I got so tickled when you were reading--you know, if 
you look at our people and what they do, they do real jobs. They're out 
there showing up. And every time they come in contact with somebody, 
they destroy another stereotype. They rob people of another attack.
    You know, when we were in that awful battle that I waged and didn't 
win over the military service issue, there was a national survey run 
which showed that the most significant factor tilting people in favor of 
the so-called gays in the military policy was whether they consciously 
were aware that they had known a gay person. And those who said they 
were consciously aware that they had a personal relationship, contact 
with a gay person were two to one in favor of the policy.
    Now, I say that because I believe that our whole society is like all 
of us are individually. We've got these scales always tilting back and 
forth between the forces of hope and the forces of fear. And what people 
do not know, they more easily fear. What they fear, they can easily 
hate. And what they hate, they

[[Page 1972]]

quickly dehumanize. And it is a slippery slope.
    So I say to you, this hate crimes legislation is important. People 
say, ``Well, you know, the killers of James Byrd got the death penalty 
in Texas, and maybe you don't need it.'' But we do need it, because 
there are 8,000 reported hate crimes in 1997 alone, about one an hour. 
And people need to focus on it.
    When those kids got shot at the Jewish community center school, and 
then that Filipino postal worker got murdered, and then the former 
basketball coach of Northwestern, and the young Korean Christian walking 
out of his church got shot in the heartland of Illinois and Indiana. And 
all of those things happened. And all of you know that we are now 
observing the one-year anniversary of the death of young Matthew 
Shepard, and I want to say I am honored beyond words that his mother, 
Judy, is with us tonight. And I'd like to ask her to stand.
    I thanked her tonight before I came out for her continuing work. And 
she looked at me, and she said, ``I'm just a mom.'' But when I was in 
Los Angeles last week, speaking to the ANGLE group, a young person came 
up to me and said that I had given her more legitimacy and sense of 
security and self-worth than she had gotten in her own family. And I 
said to this child--I want you to know, because this is the point I'm 
trying to make--I'm not bragging on me, here. I'm here to make this 
point about our country--I said, ``You've got to be patient with them. 
They're afraid. You've got to stay with them. They're scared.''
    And it is amazing to me--I have spent so much time as President, on 
the one hand trying to maximize your access to the wonders of the modern 
world--you know, we're hooking up all the classrooms to the Internet; we 
got this E-rate, so that the poor schools can reach across the digital 
divide, and all the kids can work computers in every classroom in 
America; we have passed the Telecommunications Act, and we've got over 
300,000 new high-tech jobs just in a couple of years; and we're trying 
to invest in a new generation Internet; and we're about to break the 
human genome code, and when we do that, when mothers bring their 
children home from the hospital after giving birth, they'll have little 
genetic maps that may--some people believe literally may help to raise 
life expectancy for children born early in the next century to as much 
as 100 years.
    And you know, it's all so exciting. But it is profoundly sobering to 
consider that at the time of greatest technological change in all of 
human history, we are most bedeviled at home and around the world by the 
most primitive of human failings, the fear of the other.
    Think about what I have done as your President, how much time I've 
spent trying to help the Nation heal up from all these school shootings 
or what happened in Oklahoma City and the hate crimes I mentioned. And 
then think about the parallels we have--they're all individual 
instances; I recognize that. But think about the parallels in terms of 
the failings of the human heart and mind with the ongoing problems in 
the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in Northern 
Ireland, in the tribal slaughters of Rwanda and other places in Africa, 
where people really can't believe they matter unless they have somebody 
to look down on that they can dehumanize and justify killing. So that's 
how their life counts when we ought to be trying to tell people that 
they should be excited by the differences between people, secure in the 
knowledge that our common humanity is more important than all the 
differences that we have.
    And somehow we have to do this. And words alone won't do it. And 
laws are important, but laws alone won't do it, either. And we've got to 
go out and confront our neighbors, including our own families. We've got 
to ask people to listen as well as to talk. And we have to help people 
to get beyond their fears.
    You know, when I go and give speeches to political groups, I tell 
them that I want America to continue to change, that I myself would not 
vote for anyone who ran for President saying, ``Vote for me. I'll do 
just what Bill Clinton did. He did a good job,'' because things are 
changing. And I talk about meeting the challenge of the aging of America 
and reforming Social Security and Medicare and meeting the challenge of 
the children

[[Page 1973]]

of America, the largest and most diverse group ever, and giving them all 
a world-class education and meeting the challenge of a 21st century 
economy by putting a human face on globalization and trade by investing 
in the markets of America that had been left behind in the poor areas, 
by giving everybody access to the Internet so we can fully bridge the 
divide and by paying the country's debt off.
    I talk about these things. I talk about meeting the challenge of 
global warming. And it's mostly modern stuff looking to the future, and 
it's all profoundly important. But if you look at the journey of a 
country to find its true spirit, the most important thing is that we try 
to be one America that is a force for the common humanity of the world.
    It was, I think, a very human feeling that led the Congress finally 
to work with us to dramatically increase funding for all elements of the 
AIDS fight, so that now we have continued reductions in AIDS-related 
deaths and a commitment to genuinely find a cure and a vaccine. I think 
it was a human thing. We've still got a long way to go. You know we do.
    And we pick our targets when we, as a country, when we're defensive. 
I was outraged this week when the first African-American ever to serve 
on the State Supreme Court of Missouri was voted down after having been 
handily voted out of the Judicial Committee of the Senate with the 
Republicans voting for him; they voted him down on the floor of the 
Senate by misrepresenting his record on capital punishment so that the 
Republican Senator from the home State would have an issue to run 
against the Governor on relating to commuting the sentences to life 
without parole for those who murdered other people.
    So who cares about the symbolism of the first African-American judge 
ever on the Missouri Supreme Court? You know, not many people, African-
Americans, are going to vote for this guy anyway. ``Throw him to the 
wolves. Destroy his career. Distort his record. Who cares? I need a 
political issue.'' And we all have to be afraid of that, of objectifying 
others for short-term gain.
    On the other hand, look at the number of people who are in the 
Government, in all forms of our economic and social life. There's a 
reason the President is here, besides my heart. It is the right thing to 
do, and you have been heard. You have been heard. You have been heard.
    There is a reason--there is a reason the Senator is here. There is a 
reason Al Gore came here last year, apart from his passionate conviction 
about the moral propriety of being here and the right thing to do. We 
now know that because you are willing to work and speak and stand, we 
can move the body politic in the right direction.
    People are fundamentally good, but they're paralyzed when they're 
scared. And in spite of all these issues that I go around advocating, 
that I passionately believe in, if I were told that I was going to have 
to leave this old world in 72 hours and I could just do one thing for 
America and that was it and I just had to pick one thing, I would try to 
leave one America. Because if we were together, if we were willing to 
have all of our differences be differences of opinion and not to be 
afraid of one another and never to dehumanize one another, we would be 
not only a better country here; our influence for good abroad would be 
exponentially greater even than it is today. And we would have a 
chance--we would have a chance to give our children the millennium that 
they deserve.
    So I say again, the most important thing I want to say to you is 
thank you. I'm proud of what we've done together. I wish we could have 
done better. I hope we can do more.
    But never forget, you deserve most of the credit. And you will get 
more as you fight harder but also as you are human to people who do not 
see you. You must--you've got to believe in this great country, that 
this is fundamentally a good country, that Alexis de Tocqueville was 
right when he said, ``America is great because America is good.''
    But you know, we've done a lot of things that were pretty lousy, 
starting with slavery, as Thomas Jefferson said. So we all are always in 
the process of learning to be better, of learning how our attitudes and 
our actions are in conflict with what we believe. Life is a constant 
struggle, therefore, for true integrity, for integrating your mind and 
your body and your spirit. And so is the life of a nation.

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    I am indebted to you because I happened to be President and to seek 
this job at a time when you were raising these issues, and you gave me a 
chance to make a contribution. You made me a better President; you made 
me a better person.
    Don't give up, and don't you ever turn dark. Don't do it. We can 
still make the America of our dreams.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:56 p.m. at the Sheraton New York Hotel 
and Tower. In his remarks, he referred to Jeff Soref, executive 
director, and Kate Callivan and Matt Forman, cochairs, Empire State 
Pride; Mark Green, New York City public advocate; Emily Giske, vice 
chair, New York State Democratic Party; James C. Hormel, U.S. Ambassador 
to Luxembourg; and Ronnie L. White, nominee for U.S. District Judge for 
the Eastern District of Missouri. The President also referred to ANGLE, 
Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality. A tape was not available for 
verification of the content of these remarks.