Hillary Clinton's Powerful Tribute To Edie Windsor Was Only One Part Of Her Amazing, Moving Funeral
Edie Windsor’s funeral took place Friday. Hillary Clinton gave a beautiful speech, as did many others—with Windsor’s history-making life remembered with laughs and tears.
TIM TEEMAN
09.15.17 11:30 PM ET
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This public funeral for Windsor, who died on Tuesday at age 88, was attended by her surviving wife Judith Kasen-Windsor, family, friends, grand poobahs including Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Kaplan too. Windsor’s victory at the Supreme Court had paved the way for marriage equality nationwide. Her legal fight had begun because New York state did not recognize the validity of Windsor’s 2007 Canadian marriage to Spyer, and she had to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes. If, as Windsor would say, Thea had been Theo (i.e. a husband, and theirs a heterosexual marriage), she would not have had to pay anything.
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‘She helped to change hearts and minds, including mine’
Hillary Clinton was welcomed with a standing ovation, and paid tribute to Windsor’s “positive lasting influence on our country and the world.” She was honored to be there, she added.
Noting that among the outpouring of tributes to Windsor, one had come from a fact-checker who had worked on a profile of her, Clinton said, “And I have to tell you, I have a really high regard for fact-checkers,” she said to laughter. “I may turn to the rabbis to ask for some smidgeon of forgiveness for how I feel about those who dwell in alternate realities.”
Windsor had grown up in a time when it was expected she would settle down with a husband. Instead, by 23, she was divorced and living on her own in Manhattan. She was a trailblazer as a female computer programmer, Clinton said.
“Edie and Thea were inseparable. Before Stonewall, before Pride parades, before two women could marry anywhere in the world, their devotion to each other was its own quiet, revolutionary act.”
When Windsor won her case at the Supreme Court, much of America cheered, realizing a wrong had been righted, Clinton said. Her campaigning continued. “She helped to changed hearts and minds including mine, and we are forever grateful for that,” Clinton said.
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