Howard Dean sits down with Freshman Senator Kirsten Gilliband of NY to talk healthcare, the Employment Free Choice Act, and at the 4:50 mark, same-sex marriage and DADT. Watch:

There was a lot of concern when Gillibrand filled the vacancy left by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that she would not be a strong ally for the LGBT community. I think we can safely put those fears to rest.

Secretary of State Hillary  Clinton is preparing to release a memo soon advocating equal benefits to all State department employees. Some of the passages from the memo include…

“Historically, domestic partners of Foreign Service members have not been provided the same training, benefits, allowances and protections that other family members receive. These inequities are unfair and must end.”

“Providing training, medical care and other benefits to domestic partners promote the cohesiveness, safety and effectiveness of our posts abroad.”

“It will also help the department attract and retain personnel in a competitive environment where domestic partner benefits and allowances are increasingly the norm for world-class employers.”

“At bottom, the department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex domestic partners because it is the right thing to do.”

The memo which was obtained by AP has not yet been made public. Any policy changes will not take effect immediately however as they are  subject to an inter-agency review before being implemented. Currently, domestic partners are been denied benefits because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which does not permit the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages.

Just as we lacked a strong political voice in the vein of Harvey Milk during the battle to defeat Prop 8, we also lack a voice on the national level to make the moral case for advancing LGBT civil rights. New York Times columnist Frank Rich holds Democrats feet to the fire for not having the courage to drive that message home:

… The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so. Let’s not forget that “don’t ask” and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton’s watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s promise to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton, who favored only a partial revision.

So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.

…

As [Evan] Wolfson reminds us in his book “Why Marriage Matters,” Dr. King addressed such dawdling in 1963. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait,’ ” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ”

There is a possibility the White House will find its “voice” on many issues (hopefully DADT in particular) this June which is Pride month. California representative Howard Berman predicted in an interview last week that the White House would be making an announcement on a number of LGBT issues, though declined to give specifics.