I fall into the Reagan hype

I've been avoiding the Reagan thing, because it's too predictable, and really in poor taste. I've never really had good taste to begin with though, and in the course of doing my daily reading, I came across Deroy Murdock's piece "The Homophobe Myth: The facts about Ronald Reagan" at the National Review Online. Murdock works very hard to defend Ronald Reagan and presents a lot of facts, quotes, and anecdotes to argue that Reagan liked gays and was very concerned about AIDS. It is, like, totally the liberal media attacking Reagan unfaily, or so Murdock says.

I did enjoy the anecdote about the Reagan's inviting the White House's interior designer and his partner over for dinner. How stereotypically quaint and patronizing. Some of my best friends are [fill in the blank with some 'other' people], so don't call me [insert -ism, -phobia, etc].

Murdock does point to some important facts and does indeed refute some of the details in the debate over Reagan's AIDS legacy. For instance, Reagan did allocate money for the emerging epidemic. It would have been negligent not to do so. However, while he may have earmarked funds for AIDS research and prevention, many other closely related areas were seeing huge cuts.

Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker in 1987:

Speaking to reporters following the president's speech Wednesday, Weicker said, ''The most damaging piece of deception as far as the president is concerned is that he says, 'I'm asking for $100 million more in AIDS research.'

''That sounds very good until you hear that he is asking for a $600 million cut in the funds to go to the National Institutes of Health for basic biomedical research. The net of all that is he has cut $500 million for AIDS.''

Of course, these cuts were occurring across the board. It was a horrible strain on social agencies and health departments dealing with a new and deadly disease.

But that aspect of republican politics was not the only critical flaw in Reagan's response to AIDS. Reagan may well have been tolerant of the GLBT community, but political ties to the rise of religious conservatism compromised his ability to react and contributed greatly to his lackluster performance on AIDS.

Michael Bronski in the Advocate:

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 Sen. 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, Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the Administration’s policies.

Reagan neglected to speak out against these statements. Further, the most damaging aspect of his connection to religious fundamentalists come in the form of legislation to prevent effective HIV prevention

Again from Bronski:

When health and support groups in the gay community were beginning to initiate education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987, Helms amended a federal appropriations bill to prohibit AIDS education efforts that “encourage or promote homosexual activity”—that is, efforts that tell gay men how to have safe sex.

That rediculous amendment still stands today for any HIV program or health department that recieves federal funding. It's also just vague enough that interpretion rests on whichever policital wind is blowing.

My real point tonight is this: Who gives a fuck when Reagan actually said the acronym "AIDS"? And his personal experiences with homosexuals weren't going to translate into any kind of effective AIDS policy. And providing funding for research and prevention is all well and good but, what's the point if every government agency around them is collapsing?

The problems with Reagan's AIDS policies aren't in the details; step back and look at the bigger picture.