Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On How Could This Hap

The windsor case and goma was decided on its merits. It was a decision. It took all of the arguments made and it also talked about the importance of marriage and wide marriage is important which is very much an argument though wasnt in the case and, in so i think its every one is under challenge of the state or federal level. Of course they cite windsor but in every federal case the judge has also cited the perry, im pretty sure its every case they went to the trial record in making judgments about their sexuality of choice or the harm that is done to and in their children by telling people you cant get married. I think both those cases have been mutually beneficial and we will relatively have to see what the Supreme Court decides to do in the end. You touched on briefly about the fact that the entire culture between movement was behind the fact that they were bring it to the Supreme Court. What are your thoughts . For instance the former Bishop Robinson was against the fact that it was going to the Supreme Court and you thought it was too early. The case of the civil rights amendment civil rights amendment they didnt pursue the Supreme Court level so the majority of the country was for it. Do you think it was too early in what are your thoughts if you dont think it was too early . Guest i think you have to play the whatif game. I didnt think anything. I thought it was a great story and i wanted to follow it in right of book about it. But with the benefit of hindsight what if cap will somehow gotten his way. Kettles and did not want a trial. That trial slow things down than he also did want a bunch of things that opted to slow the pace down when it was in the appellate face. What if it had gotten up to the Supreme Court as fast as he wanted to get . With the outcome have been the same because the concern was not that everybody can share the goal. The concern was five justices of the United States Supreme Court would vote and say these spams are unconstitutional and enshrine out into legal precedent. The worry was people remember what happened. Bowers was the case that preceded lawrence fico texas. The bowers case was essentially the consensus was georgia statute. The consensus was the Supreme Court doesnt like to reverse itself and so how much longer could this way. On the other hand lets talk about those that are what if on the other side. The people bringing this thought was you know this wasnt just about marriage. That it was about one state says that certain kinds of relationships are worthy of something and others are not, but that has consequences that goes far beyond the ability not to walk down the aisle and call yourself married. And chad griffins view it drives things like bullying in schools. It drives things like the fact that and teenagers have a higher suicide rate. It drives things like the higher rate of and homelessness. So from their point of view their point of view is what if another generation or five grades of kids grow up and are still being taught this. Chris testified at the trial and she said if bands like proposition he did not exist biking california her entire life would have been left on a higher so from their point of view there is more no more time to wait and what if mitt romney had been elected instead of barack obama . That was a distinct possibility and came somewhat close to happening. One of the older liberal justices were to die and be replaced by romney. Let there be even the possibility of five boats at that point in how much longer would he have to wait then . Thats been a kind of thing about history. You cant predict it and its hard to know how things would have turned out if it didnt play out the way it did. I have a broader question sort of in which case was the watershed but what really, what really legalized gay marriage around the country . Was that the case and its kind of this question, is it brown or worse at the Civil Rights Movement that change things in this country . So im asking you that question. I know you focused on math because for one thing you had to call Taylor Branch and write three books to at least write about the movement. And im almost hearing your answer. Both are important but i want to put it on the spot a little bit and i really want you to choose. Was that you know, just some people deciding in a room the case or was it a movement . It is a movement and its so many important facts. It is what happened at stonewall and for those of you who dont know what stonewall is, the police used to go into bars and raid gay bars. They warned a lot to congregate in bars. It was the stonewall riots when police raided a bar in new york city. It was the aids activists who mobilized in a Health Crisis and people like cleave jones who was one of the main characters of my book and the creator of the aids adult. It was all of the work that people like evan wilson did on the ground on the political ground and it was also and i know you dont like the answer but i think a certain point and this is what was in dispute but at a certain point you need to basically say look, if this is the civil rights you cant put civil rights up to a vote. You got you dont get to put basic civil rights up to a vote. You cant pull a referendum in New Hampshire and say i dont want it in schools. Not possible. So i think the debate over when was it that time to go federal executive accords, it wasnt that was ever not part of the movements plan but it was just a question of when. Matthew shepherd and what happened to the gay people just because they are gay. E and you know over the course of this reporting period over the last five years there was a moment when one of the lawyers, one of a young gay attorneys on the team said there had been this rash of terrible teen suicides. I dont know if you remember all of these but the boy had hung himself after being taunted at school. A College Student at whose roommate taped him in an intimate act. He threw himself off of the George Washington bridge. Its this moment where this lawyer says i think we are make you so much progress. I think we are doing so much good and then Something Like this happens. And e that kind of thing shocks the conscience. One more. Hi. I have a comment and a question in the comment is i wanted to add to what you just said because i think in terms of this movement that it has also been lgbt people coming out. I think about when i was younger no one would have watched allen and now everybody watches ellen. I think as more people have been out all over whether to sportsperson, and it just becomes part of our life and i think thats a huge issue that has shifted just in my lifetime. The question that i have though is wheres this movement going and where do you think the bonds are going to be. Having been in california so much as move so fast in the northeast and not as much of the west and i wonder where you see us going in the next few years. I want to go back to your first which is that as the number one reason and we talk about a movement and we talk about different historic movements and different people but the bottom line is the reason that we are where we are today is because people have come out and have told their stories. Nine out of 10 people now know someone who is gay or lesbian. And that is the number one predictor of whether you think that people gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry. There is no question people who have come out and been brave enough to face the discrimination that comes with that, all of the credit goes to them. Wheres the movement going . I think it went back to the Supreme Court quickly. I dont think it can. Right now the two cases mike there are three cases that are on the fasttrack in the United States Supreme Court so that they dont do this on a technicality. One is in virginia, one is in utah and one is in oklahoma. If at the Appeals Court judge upholds the lower courts ruling and the utahs ban is unconstitutional one of the most conservative areas of the country i cant imagine that the Supreme Court would deny and not review that decision. I think that theres a huge challenge ahead and for those of you who dont know in more than half the states you can still discriminate against and because there is no federal law. There is no law besides the Civil Rights Act so you can say i want to fire you because you are gay or i dont like to stay in my hotel because you are gay. You can get away with that in the states that dont have specific protections which are more than half. Thats a bill in congress right now. There is a big fight over it and there is a fight about the opponents of this are saying well you have to have these liberty exceptions and you have bakers who wont bake cakes for a gay wedding. If you think about that in substitute the word i dont want to bake a cake because you are africanamerican, you couldnt do that. So i think thats going to be a big fight. As i talk to people too part of it is i think part of it is the challenge is right now theyre so Much Movement so quickly that its easy to forget that still there is 40 of the country that is give or take depending on the pull that remains to be convinced, so how do you sustain this kind of coverage in and the kind of attention and try to move those 40 . I want to thank you all for being such a great audience audience. I want you to know their books for sale. Most of all i want to thank jo for a wonderful presentation. [applause] if you like the book please post your review on amazon. [laughter] we believe that all men are created equal yet they are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain inalienable rights, yet Many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to liberty yet millions are being deprived of those lessons. Not because of their old but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply embedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand without rancor or hatred how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our constitution, the foundation of our republic, permits the principles of our freedom for many. Morality it permits in the law i will sign tonight forbids it. Booktv said Dennis Hillary clinton in little rock to discuss her newest book hard choices. I learned before but certainly as secretary of state to expect the unexpected. Nobody expected the socalled arab spring antilla was upon us and we have to learn to be agile and ready for the unexpected. While we try to build the world that we want, especially for our children and now for my future grandchild, but we have got to be aware of the fact that all these other countries, all these billions of people, they are making hard choices every single day. We have to be ready for that. Because im absolutely convinced that we have to continue to lead the world into the kind of future that we want. We cant sit on the sidelines. We cant retreat. We are going to have setbacks. We are going to have disappointments but over time our story has become the dominant story. It represents the hopes and aspirations of people everywhe everywhere. That is what i want americans to understand and the main reason i wrote this book. I know theres a big debate going on about our role in the world and we have some real unfortunate consequences still to deal with from prior decisions and the like but we cant abdicate our responsibility. How we define it, how we execute it will be the stuff of political debate that the world needs us, america matters to the world and yes the world matters to america for our prosperity and our security and our democracy. Hillary clinton spoke with us a better decisionmaking process the perceptions of United States around the globe and some of the position she had to make as secretary of state. The full interview airs on booktv saturday july 5 at 7 00 p. M. Eastern and sunday july 6 at 9 15 a. M. Eastern. Dan mcmillan is next on booktv. He presents as causes for the holocaust from the prevalence of antisemitism and political fissures incurred from world war i to germanys inability to become a democracy until 1918. This is a little under an hour. Thank you very much for being here. The holocaust has been with me for a long time now. My experience, it affects us in a way that is qualitatively different from how we respond to contemplating other historical events. When we look at all of the terrible suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other down through the centuries, we are often saddened by what we see and sometimes we are also angry. When we look at the holocaust we are frightened. The holocaust frightens people. Why is that . What is different . What is special . What is perhaps unique about the holocaust . Today i will offer you an answer to that question. I will talk first for five minutes about my book, what is new about this book and why you think you may find it useful. Then i will take 15 minutes to summarize the central argument of my book which is my explanation, my answer the question why the holocaust happened and for the last 12 minutes of my remarks i will return to the question. In what sense may reconsider the holocaust to be unique, to be in a category by itself not only among episodes of genocide but among all historical occurrences as in fact i think it is. As the title of my book implies, its an attempt to explain why the holocaust happened. Up until now we have gotten only rather partial answers to this question. The closest we have calm and books in print to an answer have been the histories of the holocaust, the narrative accounts and the defect with regard to explanation of the event they focus almost entirely on the immediate shortterm causes of the genocide. That is to say what adolf hitler believed about the jewish people and what were the situational pressures or the context that encouraged hitler to radicalize his policy from discrimination in 1933 to forced immigration by 1938 to fullblown genocide by the end of 1941. These doctors are essential of course understanding these events but are completely inadequate as an answer to the question why. They only take so many larger and important questions. For example where did hitler get his ideas in the first place and even more interesting how is it possible that the educated elite of one of our most advanced society would take these ideas since seriously that to the point they would be willing to kill for him and what went wrong and the longterm development of germany that a man like adolf hitler could come to power in the first place and how do we understand the attitude of tens of millions of germans who did have substantial knowledge of the killings while they were happening and yet you seem to have responded to the fate of the jewish neighbors with cold indifference. And eight or 10 other questions that need to be answered if you want to put together a coherent and comprehensive than satisfactory answer to your question implied. This is not to say historians over the last seven decades have been idle. Quite the contrary. Historians have in fact adequately answered all of the many specific narrow were some questions that together make up the larger question why. But they have done so by a large and specialized Academic Studies each examining this or that cause of the holocaust by and large in isolation from the others and thus we have books on hitler, books on world war i, books on antisemitism, books on psychological factors and german politics in the failure of germany and so one but no books have put these different pieces together in a coherent whole. To put it another way the historical profession long ago, at least 20 years ago, adequately answer the question why did the holocaust happened. The answer they have given us has been useless to us because it has been available to us only in fragments, not in a coherent whole. Particularly if you are not in academically trained historian. That is to say if you were normal like everyone and where are you going to start . How we going to know how to put these all these different scholarly studies together in some kind of explanation. Even if you are a professional historian it isnt immediately intuitively obvious with a proper relationship between the different causes of the holocaust. This is what my book does. It just unites the fragments. It is important i think because its the first book to weave together all of the major strands of causation, all the most important pieces of the puzzle and a coherent and reasonably comprehensive answer to the question that all of us have asked, why did this happen . So, that being said why did the holocaust happened . It happened in significant part because the pressure for democracy in germany from the 1880s on which was considerable coming from the german people, the pressure to transform the imperial political system as authoritarian to a democracy such as people lived under in france and england at the same time. Unfortunately this pressure came almost entirely from one Political Party in this Political Party was the socialist party of germany. This was very very unfortunate because it meant from the outset that for many, for most germans the idea of democracy was tainted by association with socialism. And this taint was a very heavy tainted indeed because the socialist party in germany at least in its rhetoric and its formally stated program is quite radical. They called for an end to private property and for almost everyone in germany outside of the industrial working class which was the base, the constituency of the socialist party the socialists were terrified. Compounding this problem and its impact was the second issue and that is that democracy simply came to germany very late. The first german democracy was not founded until 1919 after a revolution that followed the days of the First World War. These two factors in combination, the linkage between socialism and democracy and a late arrival of a democratic form of government to german soil had the effect that from the very beginning of the republic, a very large fraction of the electorate was held hostile to the democracy because they equated it naturally enough with socialis