This disparate treatment has rightly come under legal challenge, and many federal courts have now ruled that it violates the Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The Supreme Court late last week weighed which, if any, of these cases to take. An announcement is expected soon. With any luck, the nation’s highest court will dismantle DOMA, a decision that wouldn’t create marriage equality coast to coast but would change the tenor of debate in states considering the legalization of same-sex marriage.

After you signed DOMA — which, it must be said, a large majority of Democrats in Congress also supported — your defensiveness often trumped any suggestion of regret. As recently as 2008 you claimed that it’s a rewrite of history “to imply that somehow this was anti-gay.” You dodged the subject in your 2004 memoir, “My Life,” whose 957 pages didn’t include any mention of DOMA, as Frank Rich noted in New York magazine last February.

IN 2009 you at last said that DOMA should be wiped off the books and you endorsed same-sex marriage, getting out ahead of many Democrats who still had elections to worry about and weren’t yet seeing, in polls, as much public support for same-sex marriage as they wanted to see. But your comments since then have been sparse and succinct: no more than a written statement in favor of the 2011 bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, your home since you left the White House, and a recorded phone message urging North Carolinians last spring not to adopt a ban on same-sex marriage in their state Constitution, which they did anyway.

At the convention in Charlotte three months ago, in remarks that sprawled over 48 minutes, you seemed to find room for just about everything but same-sex marriage. President Obama mentioned the issue in his speech. So did Michelle Obama in hers. But nothing from you, and no particular advocacy or fund-raising for the marriage-equality referendums that were on the ballot on Nov. 6 and were considered such a crucial moment for the cause. You presented a mum, behind-the-curve contrast to the next generation of Democratic standard-bearers like Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, and Martin O’Malley, the Maryland governor, whose pleas for marriage equality underscore a new reality: no Democrat, not even Hillary, will be able to make a credible bid for the party’s presidential nomination without supporting it.

A leader can’t be expected to champion every big issue. He or she picks and chooses. But your shortage of words about same-sex marriage this year is noteworthy in the context of how expansively you talked about so many other topics, how omnipresent you were: the cover of Time, the cover of Esquire, CNBC, the Golf Channel.

It’s even more noteworthy because you have a wrong to right here. I say that in sorrow more than anger, and with gratitude for all you accomplished during your presidency, a successful one. You had a zest for politicking that the current president doesn’t, enormous powers of persuasion and an instinct for the center. Maybe DOMA was the center in 1996. It isn’t anymore.

On Hillary’s watch, the State Department has been more progressive in its treatment of L.G.B.T. employees than before, a development in sync with her proclamation in Geneva late last year that “gay rights are human rights” and that those rights are a priority in American diplomacy. She addressed many of those employees on Wednesday, at an event marking the 20th anniversary of an organization called Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, and she implored her audience “to leave this celebration thinking about what more each and every one of you can do” to promote better, fairer treatment of gay people.

Well, she can do more. So can you, President Clinton.

I was sloppy at the start. What I and many others want most from you isn’t really an apology. It’s full membership — and, better yet, leadership — in a movement that’s headed inexorably in the right direction, with or without you.