Wednesday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow welcomed Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank (D), who came out to the Boston Globe in 1987, thus becoming the first openly LGBT person to serve in the U.S. Congress. Frank and Maddow welcomed the president’s announcement yesterday afternoon that he supports marriage rights for same sex couples.

Maddow expressed her view that the Obama administration has been a massive improvement over the Clinton administration in terms of LGBT rights. She described former President Bill Clinton’s LGBT rights legacy, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, as a “disaster.” While the Clinton administration may have hired LGBT people and given a certain amount of lip service to the idea of equal rights, on a policy level, LGBT people’s rights were clearly not a priority.

And while she and Frank agreed that President Barack Obama has done a great thing by personally endorsing same sex marriage, he said that he will not be inviting the chief executive to his wedding later this year. Frank, who has announced that he is not seeking re-election, intends to marry his partner Jim Ready before retiring from office.

Frank said it’s not that he would object to the president’s attendance on any ideological grounds, but rather that he doesn’t want “to put my guests through the metal detector.”

Saying that the Secret Service does a “wonderful job of protecting the president,” while thoroughly disrupting the lives of everyone around them, Congressman Frank quipped, “I want my wedding to be celebratory, not militarized.”

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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