Context: Tea party successes make the movement attractive to GOP politicians because of the energy of the members in opposition to the sitting President. To define the movement, conservatives are fussing over whether or not social issues (read: abortion, gay marriage, sex education) should be a part of the agenda. Some say yes (e.g., Bryan Fischer and the Values Voters group) and others say not so much (e.g., Dick Armey).
Tomorrow night, Ann Coulter is speaking to GOProud, a gay GOP group and this has caused some social conservatives to blast her decision as selling out. On Wednesday, she wrote a column (a pre-GOProud shout out?) contrasting Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater on abortion and homosexuality and urged readers to follow Reagan and not Goldwater. Goldwater wanted government to stay out of personal choices and, according to Coulter, Reagan believed government should resist giving legitimacy to gays. Then yesterday, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, chimed in with his revisions and extentions.
About gay issues, Coulter provided an unsourced quote attributed to Reagan:
“Society has always regarded marital love as a sacred expression of the bond between a man and a woman. It is the means by which families are created and society itself is extended into the future. … We will resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.”
Looking for a source, all references to the quote I can find point to a 1984 edition of Presidential Biblical Scorecard, a publication from the Biblical News Service. I can’t find any current website for this publication, but have contacted some people for leads about the accuracy of the quote. It may be that the quote is a paraphrase of Reagan’s perceived position.
One reason I wonder if the quote reflects what Reagan’s views were at the time is because he was instrumental in helping to defeat a California anti-gay ballot measure in 1978. Proposition 6, also called the Briggs Initiative after GOP state Senator John Briggs, would have forbidden schools from hiring gay teachers and allowed schools to dismiss teachers who promoted homosexuality.
Despite his desires to run for President on a conservative agenda, Reagan met with David Mixner and Peter Scott to discuss the merits of the initiative. Opposing the tidal wave of Anita Bryant inspired anti-gay legislation might have caused some conservatives to think twice. However, Reagan agreed to a secret meeting. In his book, Stranger Among Friends, Mixner describes the occasion:
Peter and I were escorted into a bright office with windows overlooking West Los Angeles. Reagan rose from his desk, gave us his famous smile, extended his hand, and said, “How nice of you boys to come over to chat with me about this issue.”
He made us feel more at home than most Democrats did. He directed us to chairs and offered us soda. It was hard to believe that this smiling gentle man was the same person who had sent in three thousand bayoneted National Guardsmen to ‘protect’ People’s Park in Berkeley.
He opened the discussion, “I understand you boys have a case you want to make to me,” he said.
Mixner and Scott made a libertarian case against Proposition 6 and Reagan agreed. Reagan made a public statement opposing the ballot initiative and then wrote an op-ed detailing his views. Writing in National Review, Deroy Murdock describes the op-ed and the outcome of the statewide vote:
Reagan used both a September 24, 1978, statement and a syndicated newspaper column to campaign against the initiative.
“Whatever else it is,” Reagan wrote, “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.” He also argued: “Since the measure does not restrict itself to the classroom, every aspect of a teacher’s personal life could presumably come under suspicion. What constitutes ‘advocacy’ of homosexuality? Would public opposition to Proposition 6 by a teacher — should it pass — be considered advocacy?”
That November 7, Proposition 6 lost, 41.6 percent in favor to 58.4 percent against. Reagan’s opposition is considered instrumental to its defeat.
As Aaron Goldstein noted in the American Spectator, Reagan had nothing to gain by intervening in the Prop 6 fight in 1978 and a lot to lose.
Reagan stood absolutely nothing to gain by getting involved in this fight. After all, he did want to take one more stab at becoming the GOP standard bearer for the White House in 1980. In opposing Proposition 6, Reagan ran the risk of alienating a conservative base that had been the bedrock of his support in two terms as Governor of California. This would be especially true in Orange County, the cradle of California conservatism. It was also the home base of State Senator Briggs, who had ambitions to follow in Reagan’s footsteps to Sacramento.
According to journalist Kenneth Walsh, Reagan’s attitude toward gays were more consistent with his Prop 6 stance than the quote attributed to him by Coulter.
“Despite the urging of some of his conservative supporters, he never made fighting homosexuality a cause,” wrote Kenneth T. Walsh, former U.S. News and World Report White House correspondent, in his 1997 biography, Ronald Reagan. “In the final analysis, Reagan felt that what people do in private is their own business, not the government’s.”
Coulter correctly cites Reagan’s consistent opposition to abortion in her article and about that, there can be no debate. Reagan’s 1984 book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, provided a passionate defense of the pro-life position. There is nothing comparable from Reagan on gay issues.
Some might argue that Reagan demonstrated his views on homosexuality via his AIDS policy. However, National Review’s Murdock makes a compelling case that Reagan’s record on AIDS has been seriously distorted, noting that AIDS funding increased substantially every year from 1982 to 1989.
In any event, those seeking the mantle of Reagan need to deal with all of what he did and said.
I find the quote interesting because I had always assumed the Reagans to have a rather benign view of homosexuality. Mrs Reagan hired a pair of gay decorators to help her when they moved into the White House. I think they stayed overnight in the Lincoln bedroom. Also, I cannott remember the man’s name, but there was a friend of Mrs Reagan’s who escorted her around when her husband was unable to do so. He was well known to be gay.
I believe there was a separation between Reagan’s personal views and the views he took as President. Or perhaps it was just apathy on his part, especially when it came to AIDS.
The quote popped up around 2004 for some reason, I think because some conservatives saw Bush2 as going soft on gay rights. One source I have seen [The construction of homosexuality by David F Greenberg] quotes the Village Voice of 25 Sept 1985 but further attibutes the remark to have occurred during the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas in a meeting with the publishers of the Presidential Biblical Scorecard. Greenberg goes on to say that Reagan took a “stand against civil-rights legislation to protect against job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”
I’d say that was fairly anti-gay and surely not in the thinking of GOPround. Evidently Reagan may have ehad the same misconceptions about churches being compelled to hire gays and lesbians in parochial settings.
But to turn the conversation to Coulter instead of Reagan. GOProud sure laid an egg with this one.
…
His son Ron Reagan, who went to college with me for a year and was in one of my classes, is widely speculated to be gay. However, he is married, though I haven ot seen any pictures of him and his wife together since shortly after the wedding. They have an adopted daughter. Ronald Reagan always insisted his son was straight.
Oh, and working in the movies in the 1940’s and 1950’s doesn’t make a straight man gay friendly any more than it would make a white man living in Selma in those decades anti-segregationist.
Perhaps, Reagan objected to the culture of rampant promiscuity which helped accelerate the HIV infection rate. At the time, few people understood that HIV has a twelve-year latency period before first symptoms appear. So, that most people who developed AIDS at the time had no idea that they were at risk for it when they contracted the disease. Perhaps, Reagan believed the high infection rate was due to a refusal to modify behavior.
As someone who came of age precisely at the time the Reagan administration decided to deal with HIV, I was very angry at Reagan’s moralistic approach, which wasn’t terribly helpful to those of us who were sexually inexperienced and wanted to know what was safe and what wasn’t.
Fewer still understood that a geometric increase in the infection rate is the consequence of a long latency period for any sexually transmitted disease. Heterosexuals didn’t get this because they developed a double-digits infection rate of herpes simplex ii. They weren’t paragons of caution even thought herpes simplex II can be lethal to infants in utero.
The result is that radically altered sexual behavior (no penetrative sex) and abstinence were the best ways to deal with HIV, but the government failed to play any role in competent education about HIV transmission during the Reagan administration.
With few exceptions, the personalities involved really don’t matter as much as the lessons that can be learned for future public health crises. The heroes involved weren’t politicians or religious leaders. Reagan and John Paul II were out to lunch. The heroes were scientists like Luc Montangier and Anthony Fauci and activists like Larry Kramer and doctors like those at St. Joseph’s hospital in Manhattan.
Nancy Reagan has always had a lot of gay friends. Her “walker,” Jeremy Zipkin was pretty openly gay. But that is pretty inconclusive about Ronald.
People forget that Democrats didn’t step up to the plate either on the AIDS issue at the time. There is plenty of blame on lack of action to go around.
Isnt his son, Ron Reagan, Gay? I’m fairly certain he is. I do not think that President Reagan was anti-gay – He may be been misled, ignorant, etc, but anti-gay??? – I doubt it
Warren – that may be true, but it didn’t come without political pressure
A couple of quick notes.
1st RE: Aids funding. Murdock’s source lists the funds as HHS discretionary. There is no indication Reagan had any direct involvement into that funding. The other sources of government funding were from Medicaid/Medicare, VA and Disablity Insurance (i.e. government medical coverage of eligible individuals with AIDS). Nor does he give any comparisons to spending on other diseases.
2nd. According to Murdock, Reagan 1st mentions AIDs publicly in Sept. 1985. what he leaves out is that this was nearly a year after the Ryan White case focused attention to the fact that AIDS was affecting more than just gays.
Now this doesn’t prove or disprove anything about Reagan’s attitudes towards gays, but it does show when you dig a little deeper you see the argument is not a compelling as it may seem at 1st.
He was an actor, for goodness’ sake! He spent his working life surrounded by gay men. So did Nancy. Who was at one time notorious in Hollywood for certain activities. I mention this to show that they were not the provincial Savanorolas so many leading Republicans are now. In public at least. Nancy had a wide circle of gay friends who were devoted to her. I knew some of them personally. One of Reagan’s top fund raisers was a gay man who was out to them both. I knew him well when he was living in London. (He had also been a fund raiser for Nixon who is believed by many to have been a deeply closeted gay man) Nancy was always very friendly whereas the ex-president didn’t talk about it. Which is how things were done in DC and Hollywood then. And now, too, come to think of it. And it was this behavior that seemed to set the tone for Reagan’s response to AIDS: ie, pretend it isn’t happening.
DC Hart is accurate in his touching description of those terrible years in the 80s. It was the government’s lack of action that gave rise to ActUp and other activist organizations when men were disowned by their families, thrown out into the street, shunned and despised. That it should be hard now to understand his position speaks volumes to the sea-change that has overtaken our politics since the rise of organizations like Focus on the Family and its like.
I have seen this quote (or at least something very similar) on a homeschool video that surveyed evidence of biblical faith and practice in US Presidents. It is possible this footage came from a prayer breakfast or when he spoke at a faith oriented event. Unfortunately, we give away our prior year curricula to other homeschool families so I hesitate to offer this since I cannot provide a source. This, however, is not why I am writing. I am writing to comment on Reagan as a person.
He, more than most, could genuinely welcome, serve, disarm and find value in those he disagreed with. I believe he could honestly support Prop 6 on the basis for which he stated – the common decency and belief that gay teachers could not cause kids to be gay. His final couple of sentences seem to appeal to (or even beg) his conservative constituents to realize that he was not entering an advocacy mode but rather acting in a humane manner.
I do not think Reagan could ever be described as an advocate, but I certainly do not believe he was anti-gay. He possibly was ahead of his time in terms of the balance the church is trying to achieve today on this issue. I like him as a model for effective leadership. Some say his leadership was accidental. Then again, authenticity will always be criticized by some as lacking technical prowess.
Interestingly, Michael Reagan, the adopted son, has spoken publicly about being molested by a male Scout leader when he was a boy and the emotional pain it caused. I can’t recall if his dad ever even knew it.
I can see Reagan, maybe quietly or privately, making such a statement. It would square with his faith. His views on gays were not an agenda he pushed, or allowed to be pushed through him.
Here is Patti Davis (Reagan’s daughter) responding to an anti-gay portrayal of her father in The Reagans, a made for TV movie
I agree with most of this including the courage of Ronald Reagan speaking out against Briggs. However, his record on AIDS is highlighted by a spectacular lack of leadership and a dismal lack of compassion.
What happened in the early 80’s has had a considerable impact on the culture of the gay community. In New York (and presumably in San Francisco and other major cities) this was a deeply depressing era. Unless you lived through it I doubt that one can understand just how dark and frightening it was. We all had scores of friends who were either dead or dying. Back then, if you became infected you got AIDS which was 100% fatal. Early on, several of my employees died usually within a couple of months of being diagnosed.
The lucky ones went quickly. They weren’t even able to die with dignity. IF you could get someone buried they often showed up in hazmat gear. Thousands of people in various stages of the disease were getting evicted because they were positive.
Aside from all of the death and misery around us, we were all scared. I had absolutely no reason for concern yet I was terrified.
Reagan never mentioned the word AIDS until 1986 in a speech at an AMFAR dinner. The speech was written by Gary Bauer. As for the funding levels – I am not at all sure where that money went.
A few years earlier 34 American Legion conventioneers died in a Philadelphia hotel. Within seven months, the CDC isolated the responsible virus. Contrast that with the effort to isolate the AIDS virus causing thousands of deaths. The message was clear that our lives were not as valuable as some Legionnaire. Reagan did nothing to warrant divorcing ourselves from that assumption.
As for me, I am negative. My partner of 32 years recently died of cancer. He was negative too. Being negative has not diminished the anger.
Perhaps, Reagan objected to the culture of rampant promiscuity which helped accelerate the HIV infection rate. At the time, few people understood that HIV has a twelve-year latency period before first symptoms appear. So, that most people who developed AIDS at the time had no idea that they were at risk for it when they contracted the disease. Perhaps, Reagan believed the high infection rate was due to a refusal to modify behavior.
As someone who came of age precisely at the time the Reagan administration decided to deal with HIV, I was very angry at Reagan’s moralistic approach, which wasn’t terribly helpful to those of us who were sexually inexperienced and wanted to know what was safe and what wasn’t.
Fewer still understood that a geometric increase in the infection rate is the consequence of a long latency period for any sexually transmitted disease. Heterosexuals didn’t get this because they developed a double-digits infection rate of herpes simplex ii. They weren’t paragons of caution even thought herpes simplex II can be lethal to infants in utero.
The result is that radically altered sexual behavior (no penetrative sex) and abstinence were the best ways to deal with HIV, but the government failed to play any role in competent education about HIV transmission during the Reagan administration.
With few exceptions, the personalities involved really don’t matter as much as the lessons that can be learned for future public health crises. The heroes involved weren’t politicians or religious leaders. Reagan and John Paul II were out to lunch. The heroes were scientists like Luc Montangier and Anthony Fauci and activists like Larry Kramer and doctors like those at St. Joseph’s hospital in Manhattan.
Nancy Reagan has always had a lot of gay friends. Her “walker,” Jeremy Zipkin was pretty openly gay. But that is pretty inconclusive about Ronald.
His son Ron Reagan, who went to college with me for a year and was in one of my classes, is widely speculated to be gay. However, he is married, though I haven ot seen any pictures of him and his wife together since shortly after the wedding. They have an adopted daughter. Ronald Reagan always insisted his son was straight.
Oh, and working in the movies in the 1940’s and 1950’s doesn’t make a straight man gay friendly any more than it would make a white man living in Selma in those decades anti-segregationist.
When he was governor of California, he fired all of the gay men on his staff when a newspaper outed them. It’s reported obliquely by Evans and Novak in the January 1968 edition of Harper’s Magazine, and amplified in some follow-up letters from readers. Reagan always denied that there had ever been any homosexuals on his staff.
When he was governor of California, he fired all of the gay men on his staff when a newspaper outed them. It’s reported obliquely by Evans and Novak in the January 1968 edition of Harper’s Magazine, and amplified in some follow-up letters from readers. Reagan always denied that there had ever been any homosexuals on his staff.
I have seen this quote (or at least something very similar) on a homeschool video that surveyed evidence of biblical faith and practice in US Presidents. It is possible this footage came from a prayer breakfast or when he spoke at a faith oriented event. Unfortunately, we give away our prior year curricula to other homeschool families so I hesitate to offer this since I cannot provide a source. This, however, is not why I am writing. I am writing to comment on Reagan as a person.
He, more than most, could genuinely welcome, serve, disarm and find value in those he disagreed with. I believe he could honestly support Prop 6 on the basis for which he stated – the common decency and belief that gay teachers could not cause kids to be gay. His final couple of sentences seem to appeal to (or even beg) his conservative constituents to realize that he was not entering an advocacy mode but rather acting in a humane manner.
I do not think Reagan could ever be described as an advocate, but I certainly do not believe he was anti-gay. He possibly was ahead of his time in terms of the balance the church is trying to achieve today on this issue. I like him as a model for effective leadership. Some say his leadership was accidental. Then again, authenticity will always be criticized by some as lacking technical prowess.
Interestingly, Michael Reagan, the adopted son, has spoken publicly about being molested by a male Scout leader when he was a boy and the emotional pain it caused. I can’t recall if his dad ever even knew it.
I can see Reagan, maybe quietly or privately, making such a statement. It would square with his faith. His views on gays were not an agenda he pushed, or allowed to be pushed through him.
He was an actor, for goodness’ sake! He spent his working life surrounded by gay men. So did Nancy. Who was at one time notorious in Hollywood for certain activities. I mention this to show that they were not the provincial Savanorolas so many leading Republicans are now. In public at least. Nancy had a wide circle of gay friends who were devoted to her. I knew some of them personally. One of Reagan’s top fund raisers was a gay man who was out to them both. I knew him well when he was living in London. (He had also been a fund raiser for Nixon who is believed by many to have been a deeply closeted gay man) Nancy was always very friendly whereas the ex-president didn’t talk about it. Which is how things were done in DC and Hollywood then. And now, too, come to think of it. And it was this behavior that seemed to set the tone for Reagan’s response to AIDS: ie, pretend it isn’t happening.
DC Hart is accurate in his touching description of those terrible years in the 80s. It was the government’s lack of action that gave rise to ActUp and other activist organizations when men were disowned by their families, thrown out into the street, shunned and despised. That it should be hard now to understand his position speaks volumes to the sea-change that has overtaken our politics since the rise of organizations like Focus on the Family and its like.
Warren – that may be true, but it didn’t come without political pressure
Isnt his son, Ron Reagan, Gay? I’m fairly certain he is. I do not think that President Reagan was anti-gay – He may be been misled, ignorant, etc, but anti-gay??? – I doubt it
I find the quote interesting because I had always assumed the Reagans to have a rather benign view of homosexuality. Mrs Reagan hired a pair of gay decorators to help her when they moved into the White House. I think they stayed overnight in the Lincoln bedroom. Also, I cannott remember the man’s name, but there was a friend of Mrs Reagan’s who escorted her around when her husband was unable to do so. He was well known to be gay.
I believe there was a separation between Reagan’s personal views and the views he took as President. Or perhaps it was just apathy on his part, especially when it came to AIDS.
The quote popped up around 2004 for some reason, I think because some conservatives saw Bush2 as going soft on gay rights. One source I have seen [The construction of homosexuality by David F Greenberg] quotes the Village Voice of 25 Sept 1985 but further attibutes the remark to have occurred during the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas in a meeting with the publishers of the Presidential Biblical Scorecard. Greenberg goes on to say that Reagan took a “stand against civil-rights legislation to protect against job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”
I’d say that was fairly anti-gay and surely not in the thinking of GOPround. Evidently Reagan may have ehad the same misconceptions about churches being compelled to hire gays and lesbians in parochial settings.
But to turn the conversation to Coulter instead of Reagan. GOProud sure laid an egg with this one.
…
People forget that Democrats didn’t step up to the plate either on the AIDS issue at the time. There is plenty of blame on lack of action to go around.
A couple of quick notes.
1st RE: Aids funding. Murdock’s source lists the funds as HHS discretionary. There is no indication Reagan had any direct involvement into that funding. The other sources of government funding were from Medicaid/Medicare, VA and Disablity Insurance (i.e. government medical coverage of eligible individuals with AIDS). Nor does he give any comparisons to spending on other diseases.
2nd. According to Murdock, Reagan 1st mentions AIDs publicly in Sept. 1985. what he leaves out is that this was nearly a year after the Ryan White case focused attention to the fact that AIDS was affecting more than just gays.
Now this doesn’t prove or disprove anything about Reagan’s attitudes towards gays, but it does show when you dig a little deeper you see the argument is not a compelling as it may seem at 1st.
Here is Patti Davis (Reagan’s daughter) responding to an anti-gay portrayal of her father in The Reagans, a made for TV movie
I agree with most of this including the courage of Ronald Reagan speaking out against Briggs. However, his record on AIDS is highlighted by a spectacular lack of leadership and a dismal lack of compassion.
What happened in the early 80’s has had a considerable impact on the culture of the gay community. In New York (and presumably in San Francisco and other major cities) this was a deeply depressing era. Unless you lived through it I doubt that one can understand just how dark and frightening it was. We all had scores of friends who were either dead or dying. Back then, if you became infected you got AIDS which was 100% fatal. Early on, several of my employees died usually within a couple of months of being diagnosed.
The lucky ones went quickly. They weren’t even able to die with dignity. IF you could get someone buried they often showed up in hazmat gear. Thousands of people in various stages of the disease were getting evicted because they were positive.
Aside from all of the death and misery around us, we were all scared. I had absolutely no reason for concern yet I was terrified.
Reagan never mentioned the word AIDS until 1986 in a speech at an AMFAR dinner. The speech was written by Gary Bauer. As for the funding levels – I am not at all sure where that money went.
A few years earlier 34 American Legion conventioneers died in a Philadelphia hotel. Within seven months, the CDC isolated the responsible virus. Contrast that with the effort to isolate the AIDS virus causing thousands of deaths. The message was clear that our lives were not as valuable as some Legionnaire. Reagan did nothing to warrant divorcing ourselves from that assumption.
As for me, I am negative. My partner of 32 years recently died of cancer. He was negative too. Being negative has not diminished the anger.