The "AIDS Quilt" Should Be Draped Over Reagan's Coffin (Photos Here)

[David Zephyr]

It would then, at long last, have a proper and most fitting home.

Yeah, that's my suggestion: Drape Ronald Reagan's coffin with the AIDS Quilt.

Cover Reagan in his shame.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. Not going to happen but I agree that this is what should be done.

He was shameless for letting AIDS spread the way it did.

[Deja Q]

2. Possibilities as to why:

He was either braindead, utterly naive, or utterly malicious in his rampant homophobia to simply say what amounts to "it's a fag disease, let them all die."

On the flip side, had he been a man of dignity and honor and respectability, would an earlier effort to start research done him any favors? I doubt it, not politically. AIDS was seen as a 'homosexual men only' disease at the time. Would Reagan want to be a homo sympathizer?

Who needs AIDS, his legacy is full of inhumane and inhuman policies - which have been said by 500 people 2000 ways by now on DU so I won't repeat them.

And there's no point to celebrate his death. His policies are still in full swing with no sign of sanity restored.

[lebkuchen]

3. Besides the fall of the wall, the Pope trumped RR on the AIDS issue also

Reagan wouldn't even mention the word AIDS until the Pope visited San Francisco in the PopeMobile and uttered the word himself, educating the public when Reagan wouldn't.

How many had to die because Reagan would not do his public duty and warn Americans of the AIDS epidemic that might have been averted had Reagan acted expediently?

[David Zephyr]

4. Yes, Lebkuchen. And a Little Boy Named Ryan White.

For those looking for a hero from Reagan's days, here's REAL HERO:

[salin]

7. He was a very brave young man

and in being willing to speak out - brought a great deal of attention followed by awareness raising. RIP Ryan White.

[David Zephyr]

12. Thank You, Salin. Ryan Was A Real Hero.

Thanks.

[David Zephyr]

13. Photo of Ryan

[newsguyatl]

5. AMEN to that!

[Stephanie]

6. Cross-post

I couldn't agree more.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1727120

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

8. I'm with you on that

I just think Ron jr. and Patty have been formidable in their rejection of Bushco...so my protests were not for him but for them...

My request to demonstrate some decorum you know does not stem from any love of him.

Heck..maybe we can all watch Bang the Drum Slowly in honor of the real legacy.

[Neecy]

9. totally agree

I saw the effects first-hand of his callous, indifferent and negligent polices vis-a-vis AIDS in the 1980's. I saw how he stood by and said nothing as his fundamentalist followers branded AIDS as 'God's retribution' and stigmatized people who were suffering.

If you want a good first-hand account of Reagan and his callous indifference to AIDS, read the late Elizabeth Glaser's book and the results of her personal meeting with Ron and Nancy as she begged them to fund research and speak out to end the stigma on this disease. Note that Elizabeth and her daughter are now both dead. In other words, his response was silence. No funding, no speeches, nothing.

It's sickening to watch the cable outlets bestow sainthood upon this monster.

[Stephanie]

15. Silence=Death

It was literally true. Reagan has the blood of millions on his hands.

[Stephanie]

10. Blood on His Hands

Copying my post that got locked - Reagan is responsible for the deaths of THOUSANDS, including many friends of MINE who died in thier 20's. Reagan lived to 93.

<snip - the AID crisis began in 1981 but Reagan did not speak about it until 1987>

The Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes far beyond Reagan’s refusal to speak out about the epidemic. A great deal of his power base was born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a reactionary social agenda that included a virulent, demonizing homophobia. In the media, people like Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell 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 Representative William Dannenmeyer (CA) and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), hammered home this same message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, his chief domestic advisor, worked to enact it in the Administration’s policies.

In practical terms this meant AIDS research was chronically underfunded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for 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, but $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point over 1,000 of the 2,000 AIDS cases reported resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.

<snip - Jesse Helms prevents funding of "safe sex" education, George HW Bush calls for mandatory AIDS testing>


Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan’s, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ 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 Koop’s too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. 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 doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.

from: The Truth About Reagan And AIDS, By Michael Bronski
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Jan2004/bronskipr0104.html

[Kanary]

11. Perfect!

edited to add...

I wish there was some fitting, and *intense*, way to similarly memorialize the thousands who also died because of RR's cuts to the safety net.

They are truly forgotten people.

Kanary

[Stephanie]

14. God, it's all coming back

I didn't want to remember this time.

The first reports about unexplained immune deficiency among a cluster of gay men appeared scarcely half a year into Reagan's eight-year presidency. Yet even as the death toll grew -- from 184 people in June 1982, to 7,799 in December 1984, to 20,849 in June 1987 -- Reagan remained silent. Rumor had it that Reagan placed a sympathetic personal phone call to his old Hollywood friend Rock Hudson when it became known that Hudson had AIDS. But Reagan the public figure remained mute.

Meanwhile, throughout the early 1980s -- the Reagan administration steadfastly opposed increased funding into AIDS research or HIV prevention. Even as the epidemic escalated out of control, there remained a near-total vacuum of leadership at the national level.

<snip>

Reagan would probably have preferred to leave office without ever addressing AIDS, but by mid-1987 much of the general public had grown fearful of a devastating "heterosexual epidemic." Once AIDS began to threaten people who mattered to him and to the Republican Party, Reagan finally decided to give a speech, using the platform offered by the Third International AIDS Conference held in Washington D.C. He addressed the crowd of researchers, politicians, service providers, and activists on May 31, 1987.

Throughout his speech, Reagan seemed blithely unaware of the severity of the crisis around him. He cracked a few jokes, then proposed widespread HIV testing but no new AIDS education initiatives or additional funding. He lamented the sad fates of many HIV-positive hemophiliacs, transfusion recipients, and spouses of injecting drug users, all without a word about the single hardest-hit population: gay men. Reagan's only concrete, substantive proposal, if it can even be called that, was the formation of a Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic.

<snip>

Reagan's presidential commission eventually issued several hundred recommendations, only ten of which made it past the administration's censors. And while Reagan did subsequently accede to Democratic demands for increased funding, the 1987 speech was essentially the beginning and the end of his "leadership" on AIDS.

http://www.thebody.org/bp/jan01/decades_02.html