Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyAugust 2nd, 2016
Acting on a recommendation from a 13-member President’s Commission On the HIV Epidemic, President Ronald Reagan ordered a ban on discrimination against federal workers with AIDS. His actions however drew sharp criticism from AIDS activists for not acting on many of the other recommendations from his commission. Another of those recommendations included federal legislation to protect HIV-positive workers outside of the federal government. The President instead urged a voluntary approach and asked “businesses, unions and schools to examine and consider adopting” similar policies. Acting on a few other recommendations, Reagan also ordered the FDA to notify those who received blood transfusions to advise them to take an HIV test, and promised to help accelerate the development of AIDS medications. As for the rest of the Commission’s 500 recommendations, Reagan ordered another round of studies, which effectively kicked the can further to whoever would win the 1988 elections. Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush, who was running for President, endorsed the commission’s recommendations which included a spending increase of $3.1 billion to combat the disease.
Dr. Frank Lilly, the commission’s only openly gay member (Jul 23), criticized Reagan’s limited action. “We’ve got a blueprint for a national policy on AIDS,” he said. “It’s a piece of whole cloth. You can’t pick and choose your own menu from it.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who had led the charge in Congress to increase the federal government’s response to the epidemic, accused Reagan of stalling: “This administration has done its best to avoid making even a single helpful AIDS decision in the eight years of the Reagan presidency,” he said. “They handpick a commission, and then don`t even have the courage to accept its recommendations… What we need is leadership, and while Dr. (Surgeon General C. Everett) Koop and (HIV Commission chairman) Adm. (James) Watkins have given that, once again the President is hiding.”
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Lonnie Lopez
August 2nd, 2016
A lesson in struggle: We queers tend to believe that presidential actions that benefit LGBT people or advance LGBT rights are the result of the benevolence of politicians. A week hasn’t gone by in the last 8 years where I haven’t received an email asking me to “thank” Obama for doing this or that. This is absolutely the wrong approach. Politicians don’t “give” us rights or benefits because they’re good guys. They act because WE acted first. There is no better example that this posting.
Ronald Reagan was an asshole. His administration’s cold-blooded indifference to AIDS killed thousands of us. This ban on discrimination against people with AIDS by the federal government was not a gift. It was the result of YEARS of hard, dedicated struggle by people with AIDS and their allies.
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