Bill Clinton: “Reverend Kyles said this is a dynamite panel. [Laughter] I think they were very good. Thank you all very much. Even…”

“Reverend Kyles said this is a dynamite panel. [Laughter] I think they were very good. Thank you all very much. Even though we tried to put the Republican on after the kid, he did pretty well, didn't he? [Laughter] That was so funny. [Laughter] You know, as good as Arizona was to me, I would never do anything like that. [Laughter] But you made the best of a difficult situation, because you did a good job, Raymond. Let me ask you all something. We've heard from people who work in enforcement, whether it's an attorney general or a police chief. We've heard from people who work in writing the laws. We've heard from an educator who's trying to systematically keep these things from happening in the first place and deal with it. We've heard from a minister who has given his whole life dealing with these matters. We've heard from a remarkable citizen here who changed the whole psychology of a community. We've heard from a young man who had an opportunity to have a remarkable experience, and he made, I thought, a very interesting point, which he deftly went by, but I don't think we should miss it. He said that he went to a very diverse school where there was a lot of continuing social segregation. And he had an opportunity to escape that on his project where he went to Israel. In various aspects, I guess most of us who have lived any length of time have been dealing with one or another of these issues our whole lives. It's been my experience, when I see some form of bigotry or hatred manifest in a particular person, that there's usually one of three reasons that this person has done something bad. One is just ignorance and the fear it breeds: I don't know this person who is different from me, I'm afraid, and I manifest this fear in bigotry or violence or something. We see that a lot with the gay and lesbian issues now, you know, where people are at least unaware that they have ever had a family member or a friend or someone who was homosexual, and they are literally terrified. Then there are some people--and I saw this a lot when Secretary Riley and I were kids growing up in the South--there are some people who really have an almost pathological need to look down on somebody else because they don't have enough regard for themselves, and so they think somehow they can salvage self-regard by finding somebody that at least they think is lower down than they are. And then there are people who have been brutalized themselves and who have no way of dealing with it, no way of coming out of it, and they return brutality with brutality. There may be others, but that's been my experience. Anyway, I ask you that to make this point--I announced a series of measures that we would take in my opening remarks, but you're in all these things. What advice do you have for me, for the Attorney General, for the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Secretary of Agriculture--who deals, interestingly enough, with some important aspects of this--and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation--I think I've mentioned them all--and the Members of Congress; what is the most important thing the Nation can do through the National Government? What should we be focusing on? If you could give me advice--you've been very good to talk about your own experience and what you're trying to do--if you could give me advice in a sentence about what you think we ought to do to move the ball down the road to help deal with this, what advice would you give us? What advice would you give to Senator Kennedy and the House Members that are here? What should we be doing at the national level? Sheila, you want to go first? [Laughter] You're good at this, so I think--everybody else deserves a chance to think. You're good at this; you have to go first. [Laughter] [Sheila James Kuehl, California State Assembly speaker pro tempore, emphasized the power of laws to express morality and the strength of a coalition of diverse people. She then identified assembly majority floor leader and conference participant Antonio R. Villaraigosa as a confirmed heterosexual.]”