Seeing straight people say āwe made it through Reagan!ā Is making me go fucking insane and I want to cry
āIn 1981 with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic also came the emergence of the Christian Right, who which Reagen ushered into power and disgustingly seized the moment as a sign of Godās abhorrence for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Reagan, who saw the first signs of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, his first year in office, . said āmaybe the Lord brought down the plague because illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.ā
AIDS research was chronically under-funded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982 the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS and $9 million on Legionnaireās Disease. At that point more than 1,000 of the 2,000 reported AIDS cases resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaireās Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years
In 1986, Reagan ordered Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major government report on AIDS. Critics attacked Reagan for ordering the report on the same day he submitted requests to reduce the AIDS budget, according to the Globe. Koopās report called for mandatory sex education for children as early as elementary school, but Reaganās education secretary, William Bennett, and his undersecretary of education, Gary Bauer, strenuously opposed those efforts, calling for abstinence-oriented education.
But Reagan still remained silent to the public
Finally near the end of 1986 Reagan requested $85 million for AIDS research, but Congress horrified at the low number bumped that figure up to $244 million only to have Reagan then unsuccessfully try to rescind $50 million of that figure, according to the Boston Globe, he ultimately agreed to Congressā figure. In 1987, Reagan proposed cutting the research budget for AIDS down to $214 million. Congress again responded dramatically against Reagen by raising it to about $400 million.
It would not be until 1987 when pushed that Reagan would publicly speak about the AIDS epidemic in a major policy address. By the end of that year, 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. He and his administration did almost nothing during the first seven years of the epidemic. AIDS research was chronically underfunded. Community education and prevention programs were routinely denied federal funding and would have been even more so if Regan had had his way. Only when pushed did Reagan offer any assistance.ā
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Thank you for this addition! Itās very helpful. I didnāt expect this post to get notes tbh
Our vice president elect, Mike Pence, has already caused an HIV outbreak in Indiana by defunding Planned Parenthood which led to clinics being shut down in areas that had no other places doing free testing (x). It was quickly determined that intravenous drug use was a driving factor in the outbreak but it still took Pence two months to allow a clean needle exchange, which are illegal in the state. It took repeated pressure from state officials to accomplish this because Pence kept citing his moral opposition to needle exchanges as a reason to not allow it despite the fact it could curtail the spread of a deadly disease.
Pence also passed Indianaās Religious Freedom Act which allowed more legal power for discriminating against LGBT+ people (x), and he advocated for tax money to be put into conversion therapy (x).Ā
Trump may not have political experience but his choice for VP does and has worked the system in ways that were harmful to groups Pence is āmorally opposedā to.
