No, Hillary. Nancy Reagan stood by and watched tens of thousands of people die.
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Last edited Sat Mar 12, 2016, 06:16 AM - Edit history (1)
I just want to say, this has nothing to do with the Primaries. This is why it is in General Discussion. This is about a completely unrelated statement made by Hillary Clinton today about Nancy Reagan and AIDS. It is important to make the record of Nancy Reagan and the Reagan administration absolutely clear.
Earlier today, Hillary made a statement about Nancy Reagan praising her for her AIDS advocacy. Here is how it was reported by Vox:
Clinton described Reagan's role as "very effective low-key advocacy" and "something that I really appreciated."
Obviously, the Human Rights Campaign, which has endorsed Clinton, had to quickly come out with a public statement condemning the remarks. (Otherwise, there would have been a revolt against them from within the LGBTQ Community--where they are already disliked among grassroots activists.) Chad Griffin sent out the following tweet: "While I respect her advocacy on issues like stem cell & Parkinson's research, Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS."
Clinton shortly thereafter (wisely) retracted her remarks by stating, "While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS. For that, I'm sorry."
This apology does not go far enough. I think the fact that anyone could utter those words about the Reagans speak to the straight communities blindness to what actually happened. So, that is what this post is really about. It's about setting the record straight, specifically as it relates to Nancy Reagan.
So, to begin setting the record straight, I want everyone to recall the public panic surrounding Ebola. I want you to keep the fear and panic that swept across the country, to the attention that it got in the media, and the reaction in the general public. Then I want you to remember how little danger we actually faced as a result of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Now, I want you to watch this video. It shows how the Reagan Administration and the press responded to the outbreak of AIDS. As you watch the video continue to hold the Ebola situation in your mind.
Now, that you have watched this video, here are snippets from an article that discusses Nancy Reagan's response to the AIDS Crisis.
The first lady notoriously had enormous sway over her husband, and could have intervened if she wished. She infamously tried to champion another epidemic of the era, drugs, with the overly simplified and ultimately harmful "Just Say No" campaign. It failed due to ignoring the roots of the cause and not understanding that addiction is a disease, not a choice. [The Guardian] writes, "Much like abstinence-based sex education... 'Just Say No' spread fear and ignorance instead of information." Like HIV/AIDS, the White House failed to properly educate itself, and as a result, let down its most vulnerable citizens in another spectacular way.
...
"On a personal level, she was someone who was not against gay people," Richard Socarides, a former White House adviser for President Bill Clinton, told the Associated Press about Nancy Reagan. "But when the country needed leadership, President Reagan was not there, and his wife — who was able to do more — was not willing to step up. It reflects rather harshly on both of them."
...
Taylor, one of the most famous actresses in the world at the time, knew that the way to White House recognition was through Nancy. Vanity Fair described the first lady’s reception to Taylor’s request as “frosty,” but within two years of Hudson’s death, Ronald Reagan was at the AmfAR Award Dinner.
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Despite the offensive speech, the White House had finally acknowledged AIDS, urged by the celebrities, rather than the ordinary citizens, suffering from the epidemic. "If you can personalize an issue, either because of a tragedy like Rock Hudson or in some other way,” Ron Reagan, the couple’s son, said in an interview with PBS.. “That was the way you got to [Ronald Reagan,] and she was well aware of that. She would always try to put a human face on something to him.”
In short Nancy Reagan deliberately stood in the way to avoid having her husband entangled with the AIDS Crisis. Why? She didn't want a scandal. It took the death of Rock Hudson, a close personal friend of the family, and public and private pressure from people in Hollywood--people like Elizabeth Taylor--to finally even get the Reagans to acknowledge the existence of AIDS publicly. Keep in mind that the Reagans were deeply connected socially with the Hollywood elite. Meanwhile tens of thousands died while the Reagan White House treated it as a joke.
What was it like for ordinary people suffering from AIDS? Here is an article dealing with one such story:
...Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
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Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn't know what was wrong with him and didn't care. She wouldn't come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. It was a hymn Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS over the course of the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn't turn their backs on their loved ones. Whether that was because of religious conviction or fear of the virus, Burks still doesn't know.
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Burks' stories from that time border on nightmarish, with her watching one person after another waste away before her eyes. She would sometimes go to three funerals a day in the early years, including the funerals of many people she'd befriended while fighting the disease. Many of her memories seem to have blurred together into a kind of terrible shade. Others are told with perfect, minute clarity.
I encourage you to read this last article, if you don't read anything else. This is the true history of the AIDS Crisis in this country and the reaction to it. This is why there was such a strong reaction to Hillary Clinton's statement about Nancy Reagan, and this is why Chad Griffin had to come out so quickly to counter those remarks, despite the endorsement given.
Here is how many LGBTQ people, especially of my generation who were children at the time, think about this aspect of our history:
Once again, this has nothing to do with the Primaries. So, please do not derail this thread with Primary nonsense. This is about the legacy of Nancy Reagan, and why Clinton's statement regarding that legacy was inaccurate as well as why she had to ultimately retract it and give an apology. This is to educate the straight members of DU on that legacy and how it is seen from the perspective of most knowledgeable people within the LGBTQ community.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I just commented above about the number of people, including GLBT, who are resting on their laurels in regards to the civil rights of LGBT people. Even our own party, this site, do not show us respect or even dignity, except when they want something from us.
I lost a few people to AIDS (found out about one by viewing the AIDS quilt). Like you, I was worried about WHEN not IF, and somehow, it never happened! Dumb luck? The process of coming out was hard enough, but with HIV and AIDS, it made the process so much more difficult. Even today, it still ravages our community and the stigma is still lurking in the minds of people (ever get the flu and people ask, in a hushed tone, "are you sick?" as if we can't get the fucking flu!). When I was 25, I was having horrible back pains. I went to the doctor to see what was wrong. Without even confirming I was gay, the internist assumed I was, and the first fucking question...the VERY first question...Do you have HIV? After calling him everything but a white man, I stormed out of the hospital, lit up a cigarette and told the security guard, "Either shoot me or get the fuck out of my way!" He moved. Turns out, I had an inflamed nerve and it was pushing my vertebrae, basically, I almost slipped a disc because how I was treated by the medical establishment because I was gay.
The only apology I would even find useful would be her saying their record was abysmal and her comment was nothing but ignorance. It won't happen. But, as I said, this isn't the be all end all of anti-GLBT bigotry; it is a blip. Personally, I am just as offended by some of the things I am hearing about LGBT/AIDS/HIV Clinton supporters. Some people are so offended for the GLBT community by Clinton's remarks, they now feel emboldened to insult GLBT people. It is a definite 
moment in my book.
That a President and his First Lady in the 80s ignored the HIV-AIDS crisis was clearly unbelievable. She wrote a script mid-sentence and it turned out to be completely and utterly false.
I personally think this is why politicians are screwy. They make up whatever thing they can on the spot. John Kerry famously accepted a question about WTC 7 forcefully demolished in a Q&A which is used by "9/11 truthers" to this day. I won't link the video (the sources are 9/11 truthers but the video exists, search "WTC 7 john kerry"
, but in the Q&A someone asked him about a something a firefighter said saying they "pulled that building" (which actually meant that they pulled their crew from the building and abandoned operations). Kerry said "I think they made a decision ... that they did it in a controlled fashion." He was off the cuff, assuming it was a reasonable thing to do, and went ahead and accepted the guys question at face value.
Clinton's "making up the narrative in real time" thing is truly horrible though, because it presumes absolutely no knowledge of the Regan administration as it relates to the LGBT community whatsoever. It shows how completely out of touch she is to have thought that up or have invented it out of nowhere. This is a huge huge deal, a huge deal within LGBT communities, and within the left as a whole, how the Regan administration basically wrote off the HIV-AIDS epidemic wholesale, did nothing about it, absolutely nothing.
With that said, I do think she mispoke. I do think she was ignorant of those times (she was with Bill in Arkansas, and probably doesn't have many liberals in her circles who discuss this issue rarely if at all). I do think she made a error inventing a narrative from thin air that was the exact opposite of reality.
I think for her to truly recover from this, after Nancy's death is out of the news for awhile, she brings this back up, and admits her folly. Admits that Regan didn't do anything for LGBT particularly HIV patients (back then "AIDS" was "synonymous" with HIV as far as I recall, I was a kid but I still remember how merely touching other kids was considered wrong).
This apology simply doesn't go far enough. I'll await the future clarification. Hopefully she does it.
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