General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLast night's HBO The Normal Heart reminded: Why the President Ignored AIDS. 2003 article.
On a thread last night about the HBO movie The Normal Heart, some of us commented about remembering Ronald Reagan's deadly denial of that disease...how he did absolutely nothing from 1981 to 1987 when he first publicly spoke about it.
This article from The Forward from 2003 mentions some happenings that should be totally devastating to the Reagan legacy.
Rewriting the Script on Reagan: Why the President Ignored AIDS
The writer asks how could Reagan not do or say anything on the subject. Many of the same narrow minds from the 80s are still just as narrow today.
But the public scandal over the Reagan administrations reaction to AIDS is complex and goes much deeper, far beyond the commander in chiefs refusal to speak out about the epidemic. Reagan understood that a great deal of his power resided in a broad base of born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a deeply reactionary social agenda of which a virulent, demonizing homophobia was a central tenet. In the media, men such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell articulated these sentiments that portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers such as Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina hammered home this message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, Reagans domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the administrations policies.
The writer mentions that Jesse Helms amended a federal appropriations bill to prohibit AIDS education efforts.
Throughout all of this Reagan said nothing and did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagans, was diagnosed with AIDS and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out as president. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times opinion article, called for mandatory testing for HIV and said that HIV-positive gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV-drug users on their arms) Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence), when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koops too-little-too-late initiative. Reagan, again, said and did nothing. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.
My students ask me how all of this could have happened. They are all smart, they understand politics, they understand the fear of AIDS, they understand how complicated and confusing history and life can be. But they cannot understand such indifference, even when politically motivated. I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesnt know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy. As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.
That is unbelievable to me that a sitting American president would laugh in public at an ugly poor taste joke by Bob Hope.
At least French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle, looked appalled.
GeorgeGist
(25,324 posts)but that doesn't explain the people who voted for Reagan or, like our current President, express admiration for him.
lostincalifornia
(3,639 posts)There was a lot of politics going on at the cdc at the time also. France and the us were arguing over who first identified the virus. In other words resources were not employed properly
It wasn't just public officials though, many in the gay community were resistant to safe sex practices and taking proper precautions
My view is very little would have progressed if others outside the gay community had not contracted it
My wife was working for the city of San Francisco at the time, and a significant number of young men in her office started to come down with it, and then started dying
There was a lot if fear going on at the time, and what was depicted in the play about dealing with the victims bodies, was pretty accurate
DemocraticWing
(1,290 posts)Reagan and his supporters were responsible for the near genocide of the gay community.