Posted on 06/11/2004 5:24:10 AM PDT by kattracks
(CNSNews.com) - Several homosexual advocacy groups are closed on Friday for a day of mourning -- but they won't be mourning President Ronald Reagan.
Equality California, which is fighting to legalize same-sex marriage, announced that it would join the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in closing its offices on June 11, 2004 in memory of the millions of people who have died of AIDS.
"As California's state-wide LGBT advocacy organization, whose roots come out of the AIDS pandemic, we are closing in honor of our brothers and sisters who died as a result of President Reagan's silence and failure to act," said Equality California Executive Director Geoffrey Kors.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force also announced that it would close on June 11 "in memory of all those we have lost to AIDS," the group's website said.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force website also carried a letter from Executive Director Matt Foreman, who blames President Reagan and "evangelical Christian conservatives" for deliberately ignoring the AIDS epidemic.
In the letter, addressed to his best friend Steven who died of AIDS in 1995, Foreman writes that even now, "I'm not able to set aside the shaking anger I feel over Reagan's non-response to the AIDS epidemic or for the continuing anti-gay legacy of his administration."
Foreman said he believes his friend Steven would still be alive today "if the Reagan administration had mounted even a tepid response to the epidemic."
Foreman believes the Reagan's administration's response was deliberate -- "dictated by the grip of evangelical Christian conservatives who saw gay people as sinners and AIDS as God's well-deserved punishment." He singles out Pat Buchanan, William Bennett, and Gary Bauer as three of the conservatives who never let science interfere with politics.
Foreman concludes that the "unholy pact President Reagan and the Republican Party entered with the forces of religious intolerance" has "grown exponentially stronger" over the years, and he sees that as Reagan's legacy.
Other homosexual advocacy groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans, expressed sadness at Reagan's passing.
"President Reagan will be remembered in part for his leadership in defeating the discriminatory Briggs Amendment in 1978, which would have banned gay and lesbian Californians from teaching in public schools," said Cheryl Jacques, who heads the Human Rights Campaign.
As California governor, Reagan opposed the Briggs Amendment, and activists credit him with turning voters against it.
Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, called Reagan "one of our nation's greatest presidents" and said his "inspirational vision for America relied on optimism, hope and an enduring faith in individual freedom."
Yes - Gary Shilts picked it up and it sort of attained an identification with Gaeten Dugas - that term is, in fact, standard epidemiological terminology for the theoretical first locus of an epidemic, as far back as inferential methods such as contact tracing can be reliably employed. It was never intended to imply that Dugas was the sole carrier - he had to get it from somewhere, after all (and no, it wasn't from buggering monkeys), but that's how it was reported.
I knew three guys I worked with here in Houston who bit the big one thanks to AIDS: a semi-closeted geologist, an openly gay draftsman (he and his partner both died of it), and a deeply closeted-and-bearded accountant. The openly gay guy was a classic cut-and-buffed snap queen, the other two would classify as pretty nice guys. I can sympathize with all of them, and at the same time excoriate them as dumb****s for getting themselves infected.
The whole AIDS epidemic was handled contrary to the extablished practices of epidemidiology.
What should have happened with infected individuals was they should have been quarantined. The AIDS activists would have howled loud and long about this but it has worked for every epidemic where it has been tried. It was the single most important factor in limiting SARS last year.
If you take the infected individuals out of the population the disease eradicates itself.
With AIDS there was tons of hype about it spreading to the heterosexual population so that it wouldn't be perceived as the 'GAY DISEASE". The politically correct had to promote safe sex , outercourse etc for everyone to avoid saying anal sex between men and IV drug abuse spreads the HIV.
A huge amount of the money meant for AIDS AWARENESS has been mispent sponsering gay encounter weekends , and efforts to mainstream homosexuality.
IIRC the first AIDS patient known for a good while until "serological archaeology" produced more cases in the 60's was a young black guy who was brought in suffering from terminal-phase AIDS in about 1969, in Missouri. The research will have probably uncovered additional cases anterior to his by now. The fact that he died in 1969 suggests he contracted it in the early 60's or even the 50's.
I don't know who claims the earliest positively identified AIDS case nowadays. Identifying the real "Patient Zero" seems to be a moving target, and his identity may never be known.
As to how HIV got into the human population, Scientific American ran a story several years ago whose burden was that HIV/SIV (S=simian) jumped species several times, and that multiple strains descended and mutated from multiple strains of SIV, most probably by means of monkey bites or eating monkey flesh. Hunters taking live monkeys for medical research were prominently mentioned as a fruitful locus of origin. All the original infections were thought to have occurred in central and western Africa.
My personal guess is that cross-species transfer probably took place from skin exposure to infected monkey blood while dressing one for cooking. Stomach acid denatures the virii pretty quickly.
Thank you for the link.
As California governor, Reagan opposed the Briggs Amendment, and activists credit him with turning voters against it.
And we all see how that turned out. The current success of the Gay-stapo can be largely credited to groups such as the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which has been working under the radar for years to cast a culture built on a foundation of normal sexual desire as "heterosexist."
That being said, I have a hard time believing that his support was with the expectation of the monoxide-like classroom poisoning that has come from the likes of GLSEN. IMHO, his opposition was likely a reaction to the author of the proposition, the knee-jerk too-right-wing brain dead hypocrite, John Schmitz, the father of pedophilic schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau and two separate families, one legitimate, one illegitimate (for details, click here).
Reagan was the best President of my lifetime (I arrived at the tail end of Kennedy's short run), but no President is perfect.
Where parents draw the line on what is necessary for adult behavior and what is "allowing your kids to develop their own personalities" really needs to be reevaluated, because there are more than enough TED RALL'S and MICHAEL MOORE'S out there that need a collossal ass whooping!!!
I saw a sign once that said "Flies Cause Disease. Keep Yours Closed."
This article, The New H.I.V. Test Offers Quicker Results, but the Same Agony, has haunted me for some time. The matter-of-fact way this man leads his sex life, knowing it can kill him, the way he references sexual "contacts" - not people, not partners. This is the death wish he has chosen and I feel no sympathy for him or his ilk
Quarantine is unnecessary for diseases that are not communicable by casual contact. Other outbreaks of venerial disease were succesfully contained without resorting to it. All public health officials needed to do was: 1) mandate testing of individuals in at-risk populaton groups (i.e. patrons of gay bars, people living in gay neighborhoods, people with records of IV drug use, anyone arrested on drug-related charges, hemophiliacs, etc) 2) mandate reporting of HIV+ test results to public health authorities 3)aggresive contact tracing 4)close down establishments that facilitated the spread (i.e. bathhouses & gay bars) 5) target the at-risk groups, as opposed to the population at large, with with a propaganda encouraging them to change their behavior.
These 5 steps were standard for all venerial epidemics, and they worked. There were several outbreaks of VD among heterosexuals in the 1970's which were stopped by closing down the sex clubs, mandatory testing of patrons, prostitutes, and other high-risk people, tracing their contacts, and the like. Because of political correctness, these same steps were not implemented when dealing with Aids. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a result.
Political corretness is deadly, make no mistake.
Everything comes around again, not for everyone, perhaps, but for most, and sometimes in curious ways. So it may seem to John Schmitz, father of Mary Letourneau, former United States congressman from Orange County, California, and a gentleman of such extreme right-wing views that they led to his expulsion from the national council of the John Birch Society. It was Schmitz, always ready with a quip, who made headlines in 1972 when President Richard Nixon was forging ties with China. "I don't object to Nixon's going to China," he declared. "I just object to his coming back."Schmitz was brash, unbounded, and unrepentant; a brilliant zealot whose views were culled from a particular reading of history and upheld without revision. He rose easily in the surpassingly conservative clime that was Orange County politics, because he was smarter and more conservative than anyone else and was prepared to go to the mat for the truth, as he perceived it. Though not classically good- looking, Schmitz was an oddly arresting, charismatic figure, with his military bearing, pencil mustache, dark, messianic eyes, and a vitality that made him seem more alert and present than other people.
By the time of the Nixon quip, he was the recipient of substantial conservative bounty: two Freedom Foundation awards, the National Legislator's Award from the Sons of the American Revolution, the Bulldog of the Year award from National Associated Businessmen. But he had also made himself such an irritant to more moderate Republicans that Nixon's chief political operative, Murray Chotiner, often beseeched the party chairman of Orange County: "Can't you do anything about this guy?"
Oh, yes -- I remember Schmitz. I cast my first vote for president for him, as a protest vote against Nixon's a) deepsixing the conservatives who got him elected (documented in campaign aide Ralph Whalen's Catch the Falling Flag after Whalen left the Nixon administration after only six months), and also against b) Nixon's imposition of New Deal-style wage-and-price controls that garnered him all sorts of praise in the press from the odious liberal talking-head farm, for "validating" their "principles", and c) Nixon's volte-face on China and abandonment of the Gearwheel Chinese: abandoning friendly Asians was something that Nixon and Kissinger seemed to specialize in. I didn't know then that they were going to abandon 500+ American POW's held back secretly as a bargaining chip by the North Vietnamese, whose country Nixon should have paved with radioactive glass instead.
I was quickly disappointed with my choice after the election, when the press swooped on Schmitz hoping for a juicy soundbite and got one. Asked by a hypocritical journo why he thought he and the American Independent Party hadn't done better in the election returns (the journo was baiting him), Schmitz descended to the occasion by snapping something that sounded like, "What do you mean, why didn't we do better? Where the hell were you then?
His point was salient, but he made it in a way that helped humanity's enemies. The only mitigating factor for him is that it may have been an ambush interview, so that he didn't see it coming. Perhaps.
Meanwhile, I had no idea that Schmitz was Mary Kay LeTourneau's father, nor that she is one of Jeb Bush's sisters-in-law. Unbelievable.
But there are a couple of problems with the passage you quote, and with your post:
[Quoting]"President Reagan will be remembered in part for his leadership in defeating the discriminatory Briggs Amendment in 1978, which would have banned gay and lesbian Californians from teaching in public schools," said Cheryl Jacques, who heads the Human Rights Campaign.
As California governor, Reagan opposed the Briggs Amendment, and activists credit him with turning voters against it.
One, if the Briggs Amendment was offered when Ronald Reagan was governor, it would have had to have been before 1975. Reagan left office in Sacramento in 1974. Two, while I agree with you that it probably would have been better if the Briggs Amendment had been passed, how would Schmitz's hypocrisy have been detectable in 1978, since his affair came to light only in 1982? And in 1978 and 1982, Mary Kay Schmitz Letourneau was an innocent, so that what she did later bears neither on the merits of the Briggs Amendment nor on Schmitz's advocacy of it.
Schmitz may have been a hypocrite, but what's the point of bringing that up, except as argumentum ad hominem for the gays' benefit?
As a last note -- notice that in the original George article, authoress Elizabeth Kaye likes to open key grafs with "[e]verything comes around again" -- existentialist recrimination from the camp of the moral relativists.
Ever notice how unconvincing they sound, when relativists try to score absolute points on other people?
The line,
As California governor, Reagan opposed the Briggs Amendment, and activists credit him with turning voters against it
should have italicized as part of the quoted passage. I hate it when that happens. These HTML tags are so unpredictable!
</rant>
AIDS is on the rise again in San Fransissyco, is that Reagans fault? Nothing Reagan could have done would have stopped AIDS running rampant. They are victims of their own deviant behavior.
This wasn't known about AIDS when the containment steps should have been taken (about which I agree with you). Its degree of infectiousness was unknown, partly because of its long incubation period. The filoviruses turned out to be horrifically infectious. Richard Preston, writing about them in The Hot Zone, used the phrase "radiantly hot" to describe the transmission characteristics of Ebola Zaire and Marburg fevers. If these diseases hadn't been so aggressively pathological, if they'd been infectious but long-incubating instead, we'd have lost the planet by now.
I recall a scare in the Rio Grande valley some 20-odd years ago, when AIDS had just come to public attention, when health workers identified a number of field hands who'd come down with AIDS who had no known behaviors such as those associated with other AIDS patients. The health workers drew the conclusion that AIDS was being propagated among agricultural workers by mosquitoes. The term "flying hypodermics" was used. It turned out later that the field workers had lied about their behavior (so it was said), and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Lying about high-risk behaviors was very common in this epidemic. Fumento documents how large numbers of men claimed to have gotten HIV through heterosexual intercourse were lying. It was only in a few places, such as NYC, where public health authorities didn't take such claims at face value and investiged them futher. It turned out that something like 9 out of 10 men who originally said they got it from heterosexual contact in fact got it though sodomy or IV drug use.
Women were less likely to lie, it turns out.
That's interesting. If she was Belgian, it would be interesting to know if she'd spent time in the Congo, or if she'd been intimate with someone who had, who might have come into blood contact, if he were a health professional, with an SIV-infected monkey hunter. That would be getting pretty close to the long-sought Patient Zero.
Also, if she died in 1957, that would suggest she contracted the virus, if AIDS it was, sometime before 1950.
Which still leaves the question of how the St. Louis patient got it, who died in 1969. IIRC, he was young, black, and gay.
I still proudly ignore AIDS, and I plan to continue.
One of the drawbacks of male sexuality: its privative and operational quality. To the men who are asked about it, it's like lying about a traffic ticket -- it was none of your damn business in the first place, and whatsitooya?
Steven died because he chose to mount his lover's tepid penis.
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