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.

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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, 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.

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.

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.

AIDS has been seriously distorted, noting that AIDS funding increased substantially every year from 1982 to 1989.

Warren – that may be true, but it didn’t come without political pressure

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.

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.