Kakki -- I have tried to find a few sources for you that are objective, and if anything err on the side of being easy on Reagan. Here are two:
"For Reagan, AIDS presented a number of potentially serious political risks. As a presidential candidate, Reagan promised to eliminate the role of the federal government in the limited American welfare state, as well as to raise questions of morality and family in social policy. When AIDS was first reported in 1981, Reagan had recently assumed office and had begun to address the conservative agenda by slashing social programs and cutting taxes and by embracing conservative moral principles. As a result, Reagan never mentioned AIDS publicly until 1987. Most observers contend that AIDS research and public education were not funded adequately in the early years of the epidemic, at a time when research and public education could have saved lives. In the early 1980s, senior officials from the Department of Health and Human Services pleaded for additional funding behind the scenes while they maintained publicly, for political reasons, that they had enough resources. The Reagan administration treated AIDS as a series of state and local problems rather than as a national problem. This helped to fragment the limited governmental response early in the AIDS epidemic. AIDS could not have struck at a worse time politically. With the election of Reagan in 1980, the "New Right" in American politics ascended. Many of those who assumed power embraced political and personal beliefs hostile to gay men and lesbians. Health officials, failing to educate about transmission and risk behavior, undermined any chance of an accurate public understanding of AIDS. The new conservatism also engendered hostility toward those with AIDS. People with AIDS (PWAs) were scapegoated and stigmatized. It was widely reported, as well, that New Right groups, such as the Moral Majority, successfully prevented funding for AIDS education programs and counseling services for PWAs. At various points in the epidemic, conservatives called for the quarantining and tattooing of PWAs. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, was quoted as stating: "AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals." This larger conservative climate enabled the Reagan administration's indifference toward AIDS. THE ADMINISTRATION UNDERCUT FDERAL EFFORTS TO CONFRONT AIDS IN A MEANINGFUL WAY BY REFUSING TO SPEND THE MONEY CONGRESS ALLOCATED FOR AIDS RESEARCH (my caps). In the critical years of 1984 and 1985, according to his White House physician, Reagan thought of AIDS as though "it was measles and it would go away." Reagan's biographer Lou Cannon claims that the president's response to AIDS was "halting and ineffective." It took Rock Hudson's death from AIDS in 1985 to prompt Reagan to change his personal views, although members of his administration were still openly hostile to more aggressive government funding of research and public education. Six years after the onset of the epidemic, Reagan finally mentioned the word "AIDS" publicly at the Third International AIDS Conference held in Washington, D.C. Reagan's only concrete proposal at this time was widespread routine testing." SOURCE: http://www.thebody.com/encyclo/presidency.html If you feel that the above may be slanted, read the government's own version, from the website of the NIH: "The first victims of AIDS were homosexual men and intravenous drug users. These findings enmeshed AIDS in the moral politics of the first Reagan administration. Reagan's domestic policy staff feared that a discussion of AIDS would involve the administration in explicit debates over sexual practices and drug use, likely to alienate mainstream voters. So a coordinated public response was lacking. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop did not become a member of the Assistant Secretary's Executive Task Force on AIDS until 1985, four years after the CDC first noted its occurrence. He was not asked to produce a report on AIDS until early 1986, a belated response to the scale of the epidemic." SOURCE: http://sgreports.nlm.nih.gov/NN/Views/Exhibit/narrative/aids.html I cannot find the quote, but Koop somewhere said that Reagan personally hated gays, and that hatred was at the core of his actions/inaction. Some speculate that this was in part due to issues that he had about his son's sexuality. To put this inaction into perspective, Reagan appropriated $14 million within a week of the death of a handful of straight white men, for the study of "Legionnaire's Disease." Also, make no mistake, what was finally done was done in response to years of grass roots politics. In New York, in the early eighties, priests and Rabbis were lining up to applaud God's glorious wrath upon the filthy faggots. If not for groups like Act Up and GMHC, no doubt many more straight women, among others, would have perished. Best, David > on 1/30/03 7:37 PM, kakki at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I've heard a bit about this before here on the list, but don't understand > how, why, Reagan was responsible for it, etc. My recall in the early 80s is > that everyone was very frightened and concerned at the emergence of the > disease and trying very hard to figure out what it was, how to treat it, > etc. It was on the forefront of everyone's minds for several years and > widely covered in the press from the time of its discovery. Many of the > government funded universities' research and medical centers, such as UCLA > and UCSF, were working on it from the beginning. I had two female friends > who died from HIV infected blood transfusions in the 80s and lost other > friends and co-workers to it. It affected everyone in some way. What did > Reagan do to encourage people to die? Please don't think I'm obtuse - I > sincerely want to know to try to understand what you and others have said.
