The Progressive Left Still Clings 

To It's Myth That Ronald Reagan 

Didn't Care About AIDs

Gay activists flip off Reagan's portrait in the White House. 

30 years on, the Left still clings, like a child throwing a tantrum, to the myth that President Ronald Reagan made the AIDs epidemic of the 1980's worse because he didn't do enough to find a cure.  

You know who REALLY made the AIDs epidemic so deadly for gays in that decade? 
GAY ACTIVISTS DID.  

By fighting to keep San Francisco's bathhouses open & deliberately spreading misinformation about AIDs. 

Randy Shilt's describes the actions of gay activists that led to the virtual wiping out of an entire generation of gay men in the book 'And The Band Played On'.  This was the first time treatment & prevention of a fatal disease ran headlong into political correctness. And Political Correctness won.  Gay men were actually ENCOURAGED to continue engaging in risky sexual behavior while people who tried to prevent the spread of the disease were attacked, often viciously with smears. 

But what do you do when it's all over, when you realize your stupid actions encouraged people to continue engaging in the same risky behaviors that left them vulnerable to this disease?  THOUSANDS of gay people who would otherwise be alive today ended up dying because they didn't change their risky behavior because you keep telling them they didn't need to.  

Simple.  You project your responsibility for this onto someone else.  Which is what they've done to Reagan for 30 years now.  

It's all Reagan's fault! That asshole!!!!

Promiscuous gay men engaging in risky unprotected sex didn't need to change their behaviors in the 1980's. No, what was REALLY needed was for Ronald Reagan to come up with a cure for this disease and fast, and because he didn't spend enough on AIDs research or something, this caused a lot of gays to end up dying. 

This is the myth these people cling to still.  And there's more evidence against it than ever.  

Here's the real facts about Reagan and the search for an AIDs cure: 

For the record, Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in response to a question at a press conference, on Sept. 17, 1985. On Feb. 5, 1986, he made a surprise visit to the Department of Health and Human Services where he said, “One of our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing to find a cure for AIDS.” He also announced that he’d tasked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on the disease. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Reagan dragged Koop into AIDS policy, not the other way around.

As for Waxman’s recollections about AIDS funding, he does an unusual thing for a politician: He’s forgotten the success he and other Democrats had in convincing Reagan to spend more money. The administration increased AIDS funding requests from $8 million in 1982 to $26.5 million in 1983, which Congress bumped to $44 million, a number that doubled every year thereafter during Reagan’s presidency.

Finally, the claim that Reagan spoke about AIDS sufferers with “disdain” is simply a smear. Nothing like that ever happened, except maybe in the fictional “The Reagans” miniseries in which Barbra Streisand’s husband played Reagan as a bigot and rube.

Projection and psychological displacement explain why the people most responsible for the gay holocaust of the 1980's so vociferously attacked and vilified Ronald Reagan.  Like every group they appear to champion, Progressives actually end up harming it, then need to find a scapegoat to project the failure onto.  

When it comes to the AIDs crisis of the 1980's, Reagan is their scapegoat.  They really shouldn't be allowed to get away with this any longer.