Hillary Clinton: Born and Raised as a Christian Republican [View All]

[berni_mccoy]

Here are some things many may not know about Senator Clinton.

From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton

Early life
Hillary<1> Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, Illinois,<2> and was raised in a United Methodist family,<3> first in Chicago, and then, from the age of three, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois, which is also located in Cook County.<4> Her father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a son of Welsh and English immigrants<5> and operated a small but successful business in the textile industry.<6> Her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell, of English, Scottish, French Canadian, Welsh, and possibly Native American descent,<7> was a homemaker.<4> She has two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony.

As a child, Hillary Rodham was involved in many activities at church and at her public school in Park Ridge. She participated in tennis and other sports and earned awards as a Brownie and Girl Scout.<8> She attended Maine East High School, where she participated in student council, the debating team and the National Honor Society. For her senior year she was redistricted to Maine South High School,<9> where she was a National Merit Finalist and graduated in 1965.<9> Her parents encouraged her to pursue the career of her choice.<10>

Raised in a politically conservative household,<11> at age thirteen she helped canvass South Side Chicago following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, finding evidence of vote fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon,<12> and volunteered for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964.<13> Her early political development was shaped most strongly by her energizing high school history teacher, who got her to read Goldwater's classic The Conscience of a Conservative<14> and who was, like her father, a fervent anti-communist, and by her Methodist youth minister, like her mother concerned with issues of social justice; with the minister she saw and met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago in 1962.<15><11>

A couple of notes of interest:
- She met Martin Luther King, Jr.
- She worked for Goldwater's campaign.
- During her college years (not in excerpt above), she served as President of the Wellesley Young Republicans, but resigned when she found herself at odds with the party stance on the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.

The entire wiki article is informative. I highly recommend a read through.