The Senator recalls her parents' former next-door neighbors, a gay couple, when they lived in Arkansas to be closer to her and husband Bill, once the state's governor.

Clinton's father spent a lot of time with the couple in typical neighborly fashion, talking about typical subjects like stocks and sports, oblivious to the fact that they were a gay couple.

"One time," the Senator says, "my mother and father were watching a television show, and something happened, and there was a gay couple on, and my father said 'Oh...I just don't know what I think about that...'

My mother said, 'Well, what about our neighbors?'"

As the Senator's father died of a severe stroke, she recalls, one of his neighbors was the last person to hold his hand. Such a comfort would be denied that couple when one of them ended up in the hospital, one barred from seeing the other by relatives.

"The family of the one who was sick could say 'No, he's not a member of the family,'" Clinton explained. The couple "had been together since Vietnam; one was a doctor, one was a nurse. And, all of a sudden, the partner was a non-entity.

"That made such an impression on me, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that...people like you and [partner Portia de Rossi] and others have a chance to have...rights to be able to go to the hospital, to inherit property, to make sure that you can list somebody as a beneficiary on an insurance policy -- we just have to make this much more fair."

"That's all we want," says Ellen, "is to be (inaudible) fair. I like it! I like it!"

More is available to view below, as broadcast on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on April 7, 2008.