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."
Human nature does not "progress". Only a minority is interested in truth. Most people are motivated by anger, fear, boredom, and self pity most of the time. The political problem has always been seen as somehow rejecting the irresponsible and self seeking from power when they want it so badly. The "electorate" sure didn't keep Bill and Hill contained.
Actually, that is a huge lie.....when health authorities and medical groups started looking at AIDS in the early 1980's, it was the gay advocacy groups that agitated successfully to shut down any effort to corral HIV.
Gay groups were concerned that AIDS patients and HIV-positive gays would be quarantined (well, duhhhh!) and that AIDS would be used as a Mark of Cain to brand gays.
Instead, gays demanded, basically, a pill. They demanded that a massive effort be undertaken to find a vaccine or pharmaceutical cure, and that these be the only efforts made to stop the spread of the disease. Stopping its spread was pretty hard to do, given that these same gays insisted simultaneously that "government stay out of the bedroom", which is exactly where AIDS was being spread -- there and in drug-users' shooting galleries.
Given HIV's nature, that of a stealthy, recondite retrovirus that aped symptoms of other disorders like influenza, it was a pretty low-percentage play to make, insisting that government cold-start research on retroviruses instead of doing the obvious to protect public health, which would have been to isolate the carriers as a first step.
The gay activists' success at paralyzing containment efforts and channeling government participation into basic research doomed hundreds of thousands of as-yet uninfected people. They, not President Reagan, are chiefly responsible for the ensuing gay hecatomb.
Not to diss your father, but the manner in which public health authorities tried to fight the epidemic was made ineffecive by political correctness. Instead of targeting the at-risk populations, Public health authorities spread the myth that everyone was at risk. Mandatory reporitng of HIV+ tests and contact tracing was never implemented. Hi risk population groups were never required to be tested. The locations where infection was facilited, i.e. the bathhouses, were not closed down. Etc, etc, etc.<p
No. Never accept their lying labels. You have principles, they have propaganda and money and secret conspiracies. They are still the People of the Lie.
Belatedly, it has been discovered that poor needle discipline in African health facilities is also a factor. A pair of studies that showed persons receiving more regular and better health care to be statistically more susceptible of HIV infection was the trigger to realization. The old missionary field-medicine habit of not sterilizing needles between uses (in a region chronically short of fresh needles) had become the default practice generally, and it was vaccination campaigns that were partly responsible for the spread of AIDS.
Another large contributing factor is African travelling businessmen's (such as truck drivers') habit of maintaining women in several towns on their business circuits.
Seems I recall a lot of conversation on this years ago. Seems I recall Reagan being pretty openly anti-gay, which is in-line with his strong faith. The Biblehas pretty clear direction on the matter.
I could be wrong and it could be unrelated.
AIDS is just one-way that lifestyle will kill you. Isn't the life expectancy of a male homesexual something like 45 years? Having lived to 93, the old Gipper might be onto something ya think?
I'm sick of the libs in this country screaming that Reagan didn't spend enough on AIDS. How much money does it take to tell people to keep it in their pants?
Bug Chasers! All of them!
The term "Patient Zero" was actually a misnomer.
Blah, Blah, Blah. If anybody's directly responsible, it's Di Fi who didn't support shutting down the bathhouses when it was clear they were a public health menace.
And if Reagan had closed the bathhouses at the start of the epidemic, he would have been maligned as a homophobe, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah.
Reagan wasn't the one riding these guys bareback and jamming hands into their orifices. They have nobody to blame but themselves and their indiscretions.
That's the whole point of the continuing conversation about public mores and ethics, and the value of the Judaeo-Christian moral heritage ("moral" in the Roman sense, of "habits" and "practices" and "values").
The Judaic ethos certainly seems to have lasted longer than its classical and preclassical neighbors, probably because of its treatment of hygiene both personal and social. To cast it aside now in response to aggressive "scientism"-based humanist assertions, that public discussions are valid only when their terms are free of references to received moral authority, would seem to be objectively perverse in terms of the public wellbeing.
These degenerates also polluted the blood supply, causing the deaths of Arthur Ashe, Ryan White, and many hemophiliacs.
Oooooh! Getting a little close to home, aren't we?
You refer, of course, to Senator Dianne Feinstein ('Rat-Calif.), formerly mayor of San Francisco and Den Mother of the Castro.
So, who was on Di Fi's advisory council, telling her she didn't have to/ought not to close down the bath-houses sodomy salons and tell the girls to put their clothes back on and (literally) get a life?
http://www.skeptic.com/03.2.harris-aids.html
If you do a Google search on the title (in quotes) "A Case Study in Skepticism Taken Too Far" with the keyword AIDS, the article is the first hit. Please let me know if this doesn't work.
San Francisco certainly practices this particular kind of folly enthusiastically, and as a result suffers from one of the worst problems with homeless bums, squeegee pests, petty theft, etc. of any city in the country.
All good points, expecially that last one. It's completely and totally preventable.
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