I arrived in New York City in 1987. As anyone who lived there will remember, one of the lasting memories of the period is of the steady parade of funerals you went to. There was always the friend of a friend down the hall, or an associate at a firm where you practiced, or someone you drank coffee with who was dying.
And they were horrible deaths.
All of the tragedy compounded by the fact that the Reagan Administration did not give one damn fuck about the “fags” dying from the “gay disease”.
And so today,
when I read this, I was more than outraged:
It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif.,
told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”
The problem with Mrs. Clinton’s compliment: It was the Reagans who wanted nothing to do with the disease at the time.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first identified the disease in 1981, but Mr. Reagan, despite desperate calls for action and thousands of deaths, did not mention H.I.V. or AIDS publicly until 1985 and did not give a speech about the disease until 1987, when an estimated 40,000 people had already died of the disease and roughly 36,000 more had given a diagnosis.
For anyone who knew people who died from this disease, it is hard to describe how completely wrong Clinton is on this. What she said was a LIE. It covers up when can only be described as a crime the Reagan Administration committed.
She did not “Misspeak”. This is not a gaffe.
You may think we need to rally behind Clinton for the general. Fine, maybe I get that.
But silence on this is unforgivable.
Something I would add: I cannot imagine Obama saying anything like this.
From Obama’s second inaugural. I can’t help fight the feeling we are taking a step backward from him:
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. (Applause.)
It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. (Applause.) Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law –- (applause) -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
