condom yet 17,000 more gays per year are infected in the US because of
this simple item....
Again..... Why should I care about an IDIOT ???
On Feb 7, 4:57 pm, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ronald Reagan's Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS
> by Karen Ocamb on February 6, 2011 | 12:12 PM
>
> Reagan AIDSgate poster via ACT UP New York
> America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in
> recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by
> Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped
> Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent
> evocations of an imagined man.
>
> In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime
> Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember "glasnost," "perestroika," and
> the impact of Levis, Coke and "Dynasty"?) is credited with "tearing
> down" the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up
> during his "conservative" presidency is ignored; "supply-side" or
> "trickle-down" economics" still works, even though theory-originator
> David Stockman says it doesn't; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra
> scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the "Great
> Communicator" – who conned working-class "Reagan Democrats" while
> catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling
> in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass
> firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even
> before there were trained replacements.
>
> After the depraved Vietnam War, the perennial dark and disgraced
> Richard Nixon, the short-term Gerry Ford and the confusing Jimmy
> Carter (who orchestrated the Middle East Peace talks but couldn't free
> the Iran hostages or prevent long gas lines) – Reagan, the "ah-shucks"
> bad B-movie actor (Bedtime for Bonzo), huckstered his scripted
> "vision" of "Morning in America" viewed from some exceptional shiny
> city on the hill. Reagan was the imaged Mount Rushmore president, the
> right wing conservatives' longed-for King Arthur who would crush the
> Democratic Dream of FDR and the Kennedys and anyone who believed in
> social and economic justice promised by the "counter-culture"1960s.
> He'd already proven his anti-Communist bona fides appearing in 1947 as
> a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
>
> For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan's presidency was the far different
> "mourning in America." And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for
> covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn't even bother
> covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject
> refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable
> disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no "AIDSgate" for
> Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays
> deserved what they got – they deserved to die.
>
> Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, "AIDS is the
> wrath of God upon homosexuals." Patrick Buchanan, Reagan's Press
> Secretary, said AIDS was "nature's revenge on gay men." Antigay Gary
> Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C.
> Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian
> fundamentalist) away from Reagan:
>
> "[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a
> report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case.
> Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the
> report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop's
> evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, "Gary Bauer
> [Reagan's chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in
> Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the
> cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the
> people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had
> AIDS ought to die with it. That was God's punishment for them."
>
> In his extraordinary book And The Band Played On about the early
> history of the AIDS epidemic, gay journalist Randy Shilts, who later
> died of AIDS, wrote that two events dramatically changed the course of
> AIDS in America. The first was the announcement that closeted gay
> movie star Rock Hudson had AIDS and the second was the report by Koop.
>
> In an interview with me for the 25 anniversary of the June 5, 1981 CDC
> report of six gay men with what turned out
>
> Rock Hudson - publicity photo
> to be AIDS, Hudson's publicist Dale Olson said Reagan called his
> longtime friend in July 1985 when Hudson was in a Paris hospital
> desperately looking for a cure for AIDS. Nonetheless, the "Great
> Communicator" remained silent. It's not as if Reagan was unaware of
> AIDS by then: on April 23, 1984, the CDC had reported 4,177 case and
> 1,807 deaths – something that came to the attention of the National
> Democratic Convention when a candlelight vigil of more than 100,000
> people marched from the Castro to Moscone Center.
>
> California Rep. Henry Waxman, who held the first congressional hearing
> on the disease at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los
> Angeles in 1983, wrote Washington Post in late 1985:
>
> "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000
> Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's
> existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New
> Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against
> homosexuals."
>
> Reagan finally mentioned the word "AIDS" in October 1986 and was
> virtually forced to deliver his first major speech on AIDS on May 31,
> 1987 on the eve of the Third International Conference on AIDS in
> Washington. He was the invited by Elizabeth Taylor to speak at a
> fundraiser for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which Hudson
> helped start with a $250,000 grant given to Taylor. (Here's a link to
> Reagan's entire speech.) Outside the tented-event were protesters and
> yet another candlelight vigil.
>
> Shilts wrote about Reagan's 20-minute speech:
>
> "Reagan's program, of course, would do very little to actually stop
> the spread of AIDS. Though testing heterosexuals at marriage license
> bureaus created the illusion of action, very few of thse people were
> infected with the virus and very few lives would be saved. But then
> saving lives had never been a priority of the Reagan administration.
> Reagan's speech was not meant to serve the public health; it was a
> political solution to a political problem. The words created a stance
> that was politically comfortable for the president and his adherents;
> it was also a stance that killed people. Already, some said that
> Ronald Reagan would be remembered in history books for one thing
> beyond all else: He was the man who had let AIDS rage through America,
> the leader of the government that when challenged to action had placed
> politics above the health of the American people."
>
> And not once did Ronald Reagan utter the word "gay."
>
> Shilts:
>
> "By the time President Reagan had delivered his first speech on the
> epidemic, of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, 36,058 Americans had
> been diagnosed with the disease; 20, 849 had died."
>
> Photo from WebMD's history of AIDS -www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/slideshow-aids-retrospective
>
> On the USAID website, the statistics read:
>
> "In 2009, 33.3 million people around the world were living with
> HIV/AIDS. More than 60 million people have been infected with HIV
> since the pandemic began. AIDS is the leading cause of death in
> Sub-Saharan Africa, and the fourth leading cause of death
> globally…..Almost 5,000 people die every day due to AIDS. AIDS caused
> 1.8 million deaths in 2009. An estimated 25 million people have died
> from HIV-related causes since the beginning of the pandemic….There
> were 2.6 million new HIV infections in 2009, or almost 7,200 people
> per day."
>
> The terrible irony for LGBT people is that in the very beginning of
> the epidemic there was hope that Ronald Reagan would DO something.
> There was precedent for the government acting quickly to stem a public
> health crisis. In 1976, just five years earlier, the government rushed
> to stop an outbreak of Legionnaires disease at an American Legion
> convention in Philadelphia.
>
> (Corrected) And perhaps even more importantly, in 1978, as former
> governor of California, Reagan publicly opposed the Briggs Initiative
> – the antigay measure proposed by associates of Rev. Jerry Falwell and
> Anita Bryant. Opposition by the hugely popular governor helped
> significantly in the measure's defeat. As a result, Reagan received
> gay support in his presidential bid against Jimmy Carter in 1980, as
> well as the more effective Religious Right.
>
> But once in office, Reagan turned his back on the gay friends and
> staff he and his wife Nancy had known for years.
>
> Most historians and political pundits will look at the ripple effect
> Reagan's two terms in office – from 1981-1989 – continues to have on
> American politics. But for many LGBTs, myself included, I cannot hear
> the man's name without thinking of so many other names now effectively
> wiped from the collective memory – names like Michael Callen and Paul
> Monette and Connie Norman and Wayne Karr. So many names – and with
> each name, memories of joy and rage and a kind of spirituality in
> confronting death with dignity – in spite of the government's
> disgusting deliberate neglect.
>
> Names Project AIDS Quilt - via WebMD
> -www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/slideshow-aids-retrospective
>
> Former President Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004 – 23 years to the
> day when the CDC's first report on AIDS appeared. Reagan had
> apparently been living in seclusion with Alzheimer's Disease — the
> progressive disease that causes loss of memory and mental abilities.
> People gushed for a week remembering the "Great Communicator" who was
> entombed at his grand presidential library and museum like a political
> Elvis: Simi Valley as the political Graceland. There his groupies
> gather again, while those of us who remember his legacy of horror,
> neglect and death still struggle with an un-ending heartbreak of what
> might have been had our government cared and our friends not ...
>
> read more »
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