Sadly like clockwork, the Left has started trashing Ronald Reagan calling him everything but a child of God. Granted he there should be a critical analysis of his legacy, but calling someone evil is just beyond the pale. One example is how many on the Left tend to think that Reagan was a homophobe as witnessed (or not) on the miniseries about the Reagan presidency where he was quoted as saying "they that live in sin shall die in sin" something he never actually said. If you want to know where Reagan really stood on the issues of gays, read today's post by Andrew Sullivan:
His biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan was "repelled by the aggressive public crusades against homosexual life styles which became a staple of right wing politics in the late 1970s." In 1978, Reagan put his career on the line opposing the Briggs Initiative in California that would have barred gay teachers from working in the public high school system. In an op-ed at the time,
Reagan wrote:
"Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this."
Those were pretty bold words for 1978. The other charge that the gay left has against Reagan is that he allowed thousands of people to die from HIV/AIDS. They way they talk it's as if he personally oversaw the whole shebang. Again to Andrew Sullivan:
I have been upbraided for not mentioning Ronald Reagan's AIDS legacy in describing him as my hero. The basic argument from the gay left is that Reagan was single-handedly responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people by negligence. This, however, borders on loopy. Reagan should indeed be faulted for not doing more to warn people of the dangers of infection early enough (Thatcher was far better). But the truth is that it was pretty obvious very early on that something dangerous was afoot as AIDS first surfaced. Just read Larry Kramer at the time. Many people most at risk were aware - mostly too late, alas - that unprotected sex had become fatal in the late 1970s and still was. You can read Randy Shilts' bracing "And The Band Played On," to see how some of the resistance to those warnings came from within the gay movement itself. In the polarized atmosphere of the beleaguered gay ghettoes of the 1980s, one also wonders what an instruction from Ronald Reagan to wear condoms would have accomplished. As for research, we didn't even know what HIV was until 1983. Nevertheless, the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms - not peanuts. The resources increased by 450 percent in 1983, 134 percent in 1984, 99 percent the next year and 148 percent the year after. Yes, the Congress was critical in this. But by 1986, Reagan had endorsed a large prevention and research effort and declared in his budget message that AIDS "remains the highest public health priority of the Department of Health and Human Services." In September 1985, Reagan said:
"[I]ncluding what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it'll be 126 million next year. So, this is a top priority with us. Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer."
But the sad truth is also that there was never going to be an easy answer to HIV in the Reagan years. Throwing even more money at research in those days would not have helped much. Anthony Fauci's NIH, goaded by heroes like Larry Kramer, was already pushing for focus and resources; FDA red tape was loosened considerably; and the painfully slow scientific process continued. The fact that we got revolutionary drugs in trials by the early 1990s was itself an heroic scientific achievement - arguably the most miraculous progress in a medical emergency since the polio vaccine. Should Reagan have done more? Yes. Were people like Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer responsible for delaying a real prevention response because only gays were dying? You bet. But was Reagan ultimately responsible for so many tragic, early deaths? No. HIV was. Viruses happen. It's a blemish on his record, but not as profound as some, with understandable grief, want to make it out to be.
Could Reagan have done more? Yeah. But it also seems like he did try. I agree with Sullivan that there are no easy answers to how the government handled those first years of the AIDS crisis. I also have to agree with Sullivan that I doubt that many would have listened to Reagan if he asked people to wear a condom.
Reagan is not above criticism, but he should not be put to the type of character assasination that some (not all) on the Left have put him through. If we are going to play that game then we the gay left should also be condeming Bill Clinton for selling gays out with the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
Not all conservatives are bigots. It would be nice if some on the Left actually shut up and listened instead of forming prejudcies.
Calling Ronald Reagan Evil is no more "beyond the pale" than calling Andrew Sullivan Evil -- a fact I'm sincerely happy to point out whenever the occasion arises.
You Conservabots can cuddle your stuffed Reagan Plushis all you want. But for those of us who were there (sadly, fewer and fewer) it's quite a different story.
It's always easy to rearrange the scene of the crime -- once you're sure that all the witnesses are dead.
By the time this hagiographic orgy is over I'm sure we'll have a National Review cover story claiming that Reagan discovered the cure for AIDS, but Larry Kramer destroyed it.
Posted by: David Ehrenstein at June 14, 2004 01:53 PMon topic:
i was there in 1979-80.
blaming reagan for aids is just plain wrong.
nobody knew what it was,
not the doctors or anybody
it surfaced as "gay cancer" & it was several years before anyone new any of the parrticulars.
it is so hard to get this across to people who grew up with aids.
i just want to say now, nobody knew what it was in 1980.
reagan was a 70 year old man, & i was a 29 year old boho. neither of us knew what the he!! aids was.
Posted by: rignbang at June 9, 2004 10:01 PMi offer my sincerest condolences to nancy and her family.
i am a lifelong democrat, and i appreciate the outpouring of love for our own churchill, & our very own huckleberrry finn.
i was born in 1951 & brought to america as a baby in 1953. i grew up with people like ronald reagan. my mother was a reagan democrat.
though i cared little for reagan's policies, i must say that he raised us back up out of the carter malaise, & the watergate & vietnam spiritual depressions, & the inflation that dogged us in the 70's.
i suspect that many of my fellow liberals don't remember how things were in this country when ronald reagan burst on the scene. i do. it was depressing. jimmy carter went on tv & reported the national malaise.
we had to line up at gas stations on odd & even days, depending on our license plate numbers, or some such. it felt like the depression was about to bore down on us again.
i was a boho & these things barely bothered me, but my mom was an immigrant who'd come here during eisenhauer, adored jfk, & watched our neighborhoods in the beautiful bronx burn under lbj.
she had no use for nixon, but by then the country was spiralling downward.
when reagan came along he was huckleberry finn. and shared my mom's birthday. he was her boy. i've never seen a democrat love a republican as much before or since.
i was young & disagreed with his policies, though i was running with a pretty radical crowd. one day i said to my radical boyfriend, "most peope just wanna make a fair living & have a few bucks left in their pockets."
he said, "most people don't know what's good for them"
that's when i realized that the radical left don't have most people's best interests at heart.
neither does the radical right today.
i honor ronald reagan today. he was all american, in the style of the men i grew up admiring. in the fifties, life was naive, hopeful, & clean. there were bad things about it...endemic racism for one. but if we could just have some of what was good from it, along with the progress we've made, i'd be happy.
two of those good things were civility & grace.
i didn't agree with reagan's policies, but i believe in his optimism, wit & intelligence.
what we have before us is the send off of a great american. he is truly our churchill, and most certainly the very embodiment of huck finn.
i have & will continue to cry at his funeral, i am a child of his. and i still believe in the naive optimism i grew up with.
i sure hope we don't lose it.
thank you for you hospitality.
You've provided a great perspective Dennis, on how the Reagans felt about homosexuality. It is a side of the Reagans that I was not aware of.
It does not surprise me. The Reagans first of all are good people. Secondly, as no doubt you are aware, the unfair and sometimes even ill treatment of the GLBT community is born of fear and insecurity.
Fear and insecurity are not characteristics I would associate with either of the Reagans.
Posted by: dorsano at June 8, 2004 10:12 PMMark,
And you have a good point as well. I got a little bit of myself in writing and should have said I was NOT aware what was done for LBJ since I was about 3 when that happened and was more concerned with Sesame Street than the news of the day.
Posted by: Dennis Sanders at June 8, 2004 03:14 PMYou are right, of course, that the heroic worship of men like FDR does exactly the same thing in the Democratic party. I can't count how many times I've read venomous swipes at FDR's legacy - and he hasn't been president for over 50 years! Just as with Reagan, such hateful rantings disregard all the positive accomplishments and jettison the entire presidency as a failure because of a handful of failures amongst a sea of progress.
(Admittedly, I've had to re-evaluate Nixon many times in past years. Nixon rightfully receives a thorough drubbing in history's review, but that is at the expense of the major accomplishments of his career. Normalizing relations with China? Major accomplishment... where we would be today without that step?)
A week of memorials - that's fine. A week (now longer, apparently, because of the crowds) of public viewing? I don't know, Dennis - to me, it smacks of leader worship akin to what China went through with Mao Tse-Tung, or what the Soviet Union went through with Lenin, or what Argentina went through with Eva Peron... sorry, the list could go on and on.
I think what I've come to appreciate most about America's presidency is that it is not (supposedly anyway) viewed or revered the way leadership positions are viewed in other countries, both now and in the past. Europe went through many centuries of regarding kings and popes as being installed by God, and therefore having God-given authority to do whatever it was they did. The Roman Empire went through long years of revering the Emperor as the state Deity. Meso-American cultures centuries ago also saw their emperors as the incarnations of gods. We have theocratic nations now whose rulers, being not only political but religious leaders, are revered as the instruments of God's divine will. Even in supposedly atheistic cultures, such as communist China and the Soviet Union, leaders are worshipped as saviors, or founders of a "cultural revolution," and their passing is no less an occasion for solemn reverence than the passing of religious saviors.
I'm not saying that we should not revere our dead or pay them our respects. But we should always remember that our presidents, whether past or present, are simply presidents, not saviors, not heroes, not men appointed by God to carry out the Divine Will. They are not without their flaws or their great achievements; they are humans, chosen by other humans to carry out the will of the people, not chosen by God to carry out the will of God.
But then, in a world that is becoming more and more frightening to people, and those people are becoming less and less able to comprehend their world and their nation, I guess it's natural for people to want heroes that will protect them with swords and armor and bold, heroic, violent action. I suppose that Bush just isn't that hero, but Reagan certainly was and still is.
(By the way - For LBJ, no one in my office can recall such a grand state funeral. For JFK, yes, there was something similar, but you have to agree the circumstances were different. Not only was JFK a popular president and, admittedly, hero to many, but he was assassinated as a sitting president. Reagan, by contrast, died after a very long life, quietly, after battling a debilitating illness.)
Posted by: Mark Kittel at June 8, 2004 11:32 AMI don't think the week of memorials is all that odd. I don't know what it was for JFK or when LBJ died, but I'd think there was some spectacle as well.
As for the lack of criticism in the party, listen I think we should be willing to look at the whole presidency, but you know, Dems do the same thing with people like FDR who get lionized but ignore the fact that he sent 100,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps. Partisans of either stripe never look at the dark sides and we can't really expect that they are going to be objective. That's why we have historians who will judge people accordingly.
As for the Left and Bush pre 9/11, I saw a lot of hatred before then. It was not simply making fun of him. Bush has only made things worse of course, with his policies since that time.
Posted by: Dennis at June 8, 2004 10:46 AMI think, Dennis, that in the absence of any serious critique or analysis from within one's own party or support base, it becomes inevitable that opponents on the opposite end of the spectrum will take the extreme positions of villifying elected officials, to the point of wishing them a long eternity in hell.
There is very little serious criticism of Reagan's years within the Republican party. Most of the analysis of Reagan's presidency come from independent, middle-of-the-road historians and economists. Sure, there are moderates in the party that will dare to raise unpopular issues about Reagan - but are they seriously heard? The way we're treating Reagan's death (a week of open casket viewing!! What are we, Red China???) almost suggests that Reagan is revered as a savior, a leader and hero beyond mere president.
In that kind of environment, it surprises me not one bit that those on the far left are willing to spew venomous darts at the deceased Reagan.
It's the same environment we're in now, with the current Bush.
You didn't see many on the left openly hating and villifying Bush prior to 9/11. Sure, they made fun of him, but so did a lot of other people. Sure, they criticized his election and his policies - but isn't that normal for any president (aside from the SCOTUS selection)?
But once we got past 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, it became clear that any criticism of the president within party ranks was intolerable and not to be uttered. With the exception of Senator McCain, we don't hear much serious analysis of the presiden't policies within party ranks.
In that kind of environment, is it at all surprising that so many not only hate Bush's policies and his war, but also hate Bush the person?
Extreme worship on one end inevitably incites extreme demonization on the other end (it works the other way around as well, of course).
Posted by: Mark Kittel at June 8, 2004 10:32 AM