“But the public scandal over the Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes much…”
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But the public scandal over the Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes much deeper, far beyond the commander-in-chief’s 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, Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, worked to enact it in the administration’s policies.
What did this mean in practical terms? Most importantly, AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.
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 Senator 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.
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– The Truth About Reagan and AIDS by Michael Bronski, November 2003 (via startorrent02)
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1RETvug.
Tags: this is why hillary's misspoken comment at nancy's funeral touched a nerve, for a lot of people who lived through the early 80s, both reagans were seen as deeply evil people, specifically because of the (non-)reaction to aids.
