There’s nothing like a good slander piece to get your blood boiling.
Recently, the Los Angeles Times decided it would celebrate our nation’s birthday by publishing a baseless article blaming Ronald Reagan for, apparently laying the ground work for the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other accusations by the avowed agnostic, such as, "Reagan forged the GOP’s connection to the most anti-science branch of Christianity." His argument is that Reagan’s handling of the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s planted the roots for "Trump’s disastrous handling of America’s coronavirus scourge" we face today.
Spare me, please. The author, liberal professor Robert Slayton, would have us believe that a student of his found documents, for her senior thesis that prove Reagan was homophobic and willfully ignored the LGBT community in order to pander to his base. Of course, there are no links to these documents in the article and her name is not cited.
There seems to be a pathetic desperation among collectivist pseudo historians and writers, like Slayton and other flaccid leftists, out to sell their wares, read each other’s dross and then regurgitate each other’s dross. Do they know how many people spurn them? Or more likely ignore them? Or just laugh at them?
Writing about this matter is nothing new; no one who knew Reagan ever recalls him saying a word against the gay community. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone; Reagan worked for years in Hollywood, and consequentially was more open-minded about the gay community than media revisionists would have you believe.
You don’t have to take my word for it because the facts speak for themselves.
In 1978, Reagan helped defeat a bill in California that would have barred gays and lesbians from teaching in schools; the Briggs Amendment, AKA Proposition 6.
This was two years before Reagan won the White House; he had everything to lose with pro-family primary voters as he was, at that point, not the party’s heir apparent and yet he did the decent and courageous thing and campaigned against a horrendous, discriminatory bill from being codified into law. Reagan was an individualist and strong believer in all constitutional rights, not just convenient ones.
The Briggs Amendment went down to a crashing defeat, thanks to Reagan.
During the 1980 election, the Reagan campaign produced a position paper on "Homosexual Rights," probably the first campaign to ever take up the issue publicly. In that paper, Reagan forcefully argued for the rights and privacy and dignity of all individuals, regardless of sexual orientation and especially against government discrimination.
It was revolutionary and thoughtful.
Slayton would have you believe that Reagan’s "fundamentalism" (a key word that anti-Christian liberals like to use) spurned him to reject science that would have otherwise solved the problem of AIDS, and that Trump’s response to coronavirus is a result of Trump and Republicans being "hamstrung" by Reagan’s "courting of the anti-science religious far right."
Indeed, Reagan was a man of science, who explains his interest and support of SDI and other forms of late 20th century technology. This was a man who mastered commercial radio, talking movies, television, the modern press conference and sound bites.
Reagan loved new technologies.
It is true that Reagan rightly distrusted too much government intervention including into the private affairs of individuals. Ever the individualist, Reagan correctly knew that corruptible bureaucrats might use a crisis like AIDS to roll back civil liberties.
Don’t believe me?
Just look at Michigan, where the megalomaniac governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is in a drunken power trip by running roughshod over old men who just want to run their little businesses, unmolested by a deeply corrupt and rotten state government.
Reagan did everything he could at the time given the limited knowledge about AIDS. Slayton won’t tell you, but Reagan increased funding for AIDS research from $8 million to $26 million in just one year.
Some bigot.
Reagan appointed Dr. C. Everett Koop as Surgeon General, who was the first public official to warn about the dangers of AIDS to gay Americans. Both President Reagan and Mrs. Reagan did extensive fundraising for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Along the way, the Reagans become friends with the actor Paul Glaser and his wife, Elizabeth, who had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. When Elizabeth died, among the first people Glaser heard from were the Reagans.
Liberal professors and revisionists "historians" who dominate the media will forever hate President Reagan for his many successes in office. They will never stop hating him because he was a conservative, a Christian, and he loved the Constitution and his country.
As nihilists, they hate him for his optimism.
As tribalists, they hate him because he did the best he could to fight the AIDS crisis, which broke their cultish casting of him as a fundamentalist bigot. He did not start the homeless crisis. That was the ACLU, which went to court and said these unbalanced people were being held in asylums against their will.
Finally, Slayton also tossed in those weighty words that liberals use so freely against beliefs, other than their own; dog whistle, tribalist, evangelicals, you name it, the article is full of the anti-Christian rhetoric used as a platform for his disdain for Trump, Republicans and of course Ronald Reagan.
Craig Shirley is a Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian. His books include, “Reagan’s Revolution, The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started it All,” “Rendezvous with Destiny, Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America,” "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years," and “ Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan." He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, “December, 1941” and his new 2019 book, “Mary Ball Washington,” a definitive biography of George Washington’s mother. Shirley lectures frequently at the Reagan Library and the Reagan Ranch. He has been named the First Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, Ronald Reagan’s alma mater and will teach a class this fall at the University of Virginia on Reagan. He appears regularly on Newsmax TV, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. Read Craig Shirley's Reports — More Here.
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