ormer President Bill Clinton said in a conference for progressive students that he supports the right for gay and lesbian couples to marry.

"Yeah," Clinton said when asked after a speech at the Campus Progress National Conference, according to The Nation . "I personally support people doing what they want to do. I think it's wrong for someone to stop someone else from doing that [same-sex marriage]."

In 1996, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from honoring marriages for same-sex couples. He Also approved the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" law, which banned openly gay military personnel from serving.

In a 2000 interview with The Advocate, Clinton said that "people who have a relationship ought to be able to call it whatever they want. And insofar as it's sanctified by a religious ceremony, that's up to the churches involved."

He added about the fight in Congress over DOMA, "I think what happened in the Congress was that a lot of people who didn't want to be antigay didn't feel that they should be saying that as a matter of law, without regard to what various churches or religions or others thought, that the United States policy was that all unions that call themselves marriages are, as a matter of law, marriages. I don't think we're there yet. But I think that what we ought to do is to get the legal rights straightened out and let time take its course, and we'll see what happens."