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."
It's so infuriating to hear these self-pitying morons smear Reagan knowing that all they had to do to avoid AIDs was forgo unsafe, anal sex. Like all so-called liberal "victims", they simply are incapable of looking in the mirror and seeing that they themselves caused the problem.
They have their priorities...
LOL!
Heaven forbid that ANYONE be responsible for his/her own actions.
Science confirms that they brought this on themselves with their own unnatural life style. Should be grateful Reagan did not assign veterinarians the task of stopping it from spreading.
I'll post more about it later, if I have time.
Then, as the death toll mounted (among the elite, if you get my drift) AIDS finally became a full-blown crisis.
In other words, I have observed the virulent (pun intended) hatred the homosexual lobby holds for Reagan on this issue, and I'm wondering if there is any evidence that exists to support their claims. I mean, it's a straight-up accusation of negligence, no?
AMIDST the outpouring of love for Ronald Reagan, a handful of detractors continue to spew their bile. The hatred seems strongest in those who want to blame the former president for AIDS, a disease spread through un safe sexual practices and illicit use of hypodermic needles. In an essay ti tled "Adolf Reagan" in the upcom ing issue of The Advocate, play wright Larry Kramer hisses, "The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world is dead" and preposter ously delares, "Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler." Kramer, who slams Reagan for not pouring more money into the fight against AIDS, writes, "Some of Nancy Reagan's best friends were gay, the self-loathing Jerry Zip kin, at one time her principal 'walker,' chief among them. It is said he taught her how to dress." Kramer also suggests that Reagan's son, Ron Reagan Jr., may have angered his father because, "It was no secret . . . that Ron Reagan Jr., was suspected of being gay." Even if the son is straight, Kramer bloviates, "It was this perceived suspicion that . . . caused his father to murder so many of us."
"But the bath houses will remain open."
Reagan criticized for understanding that the best way to fight AIDS was for gays to keep their pants zipped. Oh, the humanity.
I wonder why the Log Cabin gang doesn't do the decent thing and stand up and defend RR against the malicious accusations & lies from other assorted homosexual groups.
The medical community was working overtime trying to figure out what was going on, on multiple fronts. Oncologists were scrambling to understand the strange cancer, epidemiologists were working to understand the spread in a small segment of the population, and now I read that David Horowitz was trying at the time to expose the efforts of the gay community in California. They were actually working against the people who were trying to help them, when public health officials wanted to close the bath houses they demanded they be left open.
The band certainly did play on, and now they try to blame it on someone who had nothing to do with it's spread and who couldn't have stopped it anyhow, because they and their own political system made it worse.
We at one point had a list posted in the emergency department where I worked of the handful of individuals in our county who were known HIV positive. When a young resident MD came to work one evening, he saw that list and asked about it. When I told him what it was, he pitched a hissy fit, and demanded that it be taken down. I refused, and he went to the hospital administration and caused it to be removed. He threatened legal action and actually involved a gay advocates group, he was gay himself. Eventually it was made so that no one in a medical facility anywhere was able to know that a patient was even tested for HIV, let alone the results. We knew everything else about a person's medical history, except if they were HIV positive. This is a disease with it's own political agenda, as my husband has always said.
Ah, memories!
Short version: no.
Another problem with AIDS is that it is politically protected, the only politically protected disease. All through the years when someone contracted a sexually transmitted disease that person's partner or partners were contacted mandated by law, to help stop the further spread of the disease and enable the partners to get medical help. NOT SO WITH AIDS, it is not mandated by law that sexual partners of AIDS patients be notified. Thus the disease is protected, not people. Gee, I wonder whose idea that was...
Its never their fault.
That is INSANE. They do everything to perpetuate the spread of the disease and then blame it all on someone else.
I had heard on the radio that nearly 6 BILLION! was spent on AIDS during the Reagan years. I would appreciate a reference for this information. Do you have one?
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