Month: July 2004

Fascinating new details from C. Everett Koop on the Reagan administration and AIDS. He believes Reagan’s heart was in the right place – but his advisers were the guilty ones. Money quote:

“Conservatives around him didn’t want him to get involved because of the people who had [AIDS],” Koop remembered. “They said, ‘Homosexuals, intravenous drug abusers, heterosexuals who are sexually promiscuous, prostitutes — don’t they deserve what they got?’ I’ve always resented that. I think I could have saved a lot more people.”

He continues:

As one example, Koop cited his failed attempt to add an AIDS awareness spin to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign. Koop saw the First Lady’s campaign as a perfect opportunity for President Reagan to address the AIDS crisis. “I contacted him [Reagan] through personal friends and suggested he could accomplish more if he appeared with her and for him to say something like, ‘That includes IV drugs like heroin. You’re not just saying no to drugs, you’re saying no to AIDS,'” Koop said.
After asking Koop several well-informed questions regarding AIDS, Reagan took the idea to his domestic policy council the next morning.
“It caused an uproar,” Koop said. “They said, ‘That’s lose-lose, you want win-win.’ He listened to those who he thought were acting on his best behalf.”

Reagan is responsible for not over-ruling these advisors. But whoever those people were in his domestic policy council, I hope they are proud of themselves.

A very sensible editorial – a nice balance to the witch-hunt of the Chicago Tribune. I should add, in self-flagellatory mode, that my quick post yesterday implying some kind of link between the Trib’s actions and the fact that a relative of a Tribune board member lost in the primary was, in retrospect, stupid. There’s no reason to believe the Trib was influenced in that way – they endorsed another candidate. If I criticize Michael Moore for innuendo, I should make sure I don’t stray into the same thing myself.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Sen. Murphy seems totally oblivious to the implications. “Will you deny them their rights?” she asks. With some 3 percent of the population, gay couples already seem to enjoy a marked advantage over straight ones in the allocation of supposedly superfluous children.
But whose rights are being denied depends on how deeply we probe and what questions we ask. Granting gay couples the “right” to have children by definition means giving them the right to have someone else’s children, and the question arises whether the original parent or parents ever agreed to part with them.
Not necessarily. Governments that kind-heartedly bestow other people’s children on homosexual couples also have both the power and the motivation to confiscate those children from their original parents, even when the parents have done nothing to warrant losing them.” – Stephen Baskerville, in an article entitled, “Could your kids be given to ‘gay’ parents?” It would be hard to come up with a more inflammatory title or a more despicable attempt to conflate gay marriage rights with the abuse of children.