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 lobbyOctober 11th, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Today is National Coming Out Day. Who do you sill have left to come out to?
UN Consultation: Compass to Compassion: New York, NY. The Union Theological Seminary will host the Compass to Compassion conference to discuss strategies for LGBT global theological equality, with particular emphasis on the some churches’ roles in recent efforts to impose the death penalty on LGBT people in Uganda. Jeff Sharlet, author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy
Salt Lake Community College’s Speakers Bureau Presents Eric Alva On “The End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Salt Lake City, UT. Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, became the first American to be injured during the invasion of Iraq when he stepped on a land mine and lost his leg in the explosion. As he was recovering at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was visited by President George Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. None of then knew that Alva was gay. Since recovering from his injuries, Alva became the first national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign’s fight to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Today, he will be speaking as a part of the Salt Lake Community College’s Speaker’s Bureau and their recognition of National Coming Out Day. He will speak at the College’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus in the Markosian Library on the Second Floor from 11:30 to 1:30 p.m. and also at the Salt Lake City Public Library Main Branch Theater from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. Panel discussions and questions-and-answer sessions will be held after both of Alva’s speeches. Both events are free and open to the public.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Second March on Washington: 1987. Somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 LGBT people descended onto the Mall in Washington for the largest gay rights demonstration in history, demanding an end to discrimination and for more federal money for AIDS research and treatment. About a hundred members of Congress and other prominent civic, labor and religious leaders signed letters endorsing the March, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke and promised to support the goals of the march. Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Gerry Studds (D-MA), both openly gay members of Congress, also spoke. The march also marked the debut of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was shown publicly for the first time. The quilt occupied the equivalent of two city blocks, and included 1,920 panels commemorating more than 2,000 persons who have died of AIDS.
Act-Up Occupies the FDA: 1988. The gay community was feeling the pressure of a ticking time bomb, with someone in the U.S. dying of AIDS every two hours. AZT had been approved by the U .S. Food and Drug Administration in 1987, but it was prohibitively expensive and required taking a pill every four hours around the clock. European health officials had been approving new treatments for AIDS, but the FDA continued to cling to its multi-year approval process. And while the FDA dithered, more names were being added to the AIDS quilt. By 1988, frustration and anger had built to a builing point, and more than a 1,200 demonstrators, led by ACT-Up activists, invaded the FDA’s grounds in Rockville, Maryland, for a nine-hour protest demanding quicker action on drug approvals. About 175 demonstrators were arrested
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, later recalled that the protest had left a deep impression. He later told PBS’s Frontline:
“After a little while, I began to get beyond the rhetoric and theater of the demonstrations and the smoke bombs, to really listen to what it is that they were saying, and it became clear to me, quite quickly, that most of what they said made absolute sense, was very logical and needed to be paid attention to. … Interacting with the constituencies was probably one of the most important things that I had done in my professional career.”
Eight days later, the FDA announced new regulations to cut the time it took to approve new drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.
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