The GOP is failing on HIV/AIDS, again
In today’s Washington Post, Mike Gerson quite rightly lambasts the "Coburn Seven" — seven Senate Republicans who are all but blocking expanded funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Unfortunately, what Gerson ignores is the GOP’s long history of failure and ignorance on the HIV/AIDS front. This sad history dates to the very founding of ...
In today's Washington Post, Mike Gerson quite rightly lambasts the "Coburn Seven" -- seven Senate Republicans who are all but blocking expanded funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
In today’s Washington Post, Mike Gerson quite rightly lambasts the "Coburn Seven" — seven Senate Republicans who are all but blocking expanded funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Unfortunately, what Gerson ignores is the GOP’s long history of failure and ignorance on the HIV/AIDS front. This sad history dates to the very founding of the contemporary conservative movement. It was Ronald Reagan, the revered Godfather, who remained silent as tens of thousands of Americans died and a pandemic was spread to more than 100 countries around the globe. Even as Reagan did nothing to combat AIDS, his surrogates in the extreme right opined that the disease was a divinely-inspired retaliation on liberalism. It was Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s White House communications director, who called AIDS "nature’s revenge on gay men." Such sentiments proliferated as the power of the GOP’s religious right-wing coalesced in the 1990s. Former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, for instance, famously called for those infected with HIV/AIDS to be "isolated from the general population" in 1992. He stood by the statement in his 2008 presidential campaign.
When historians sit down to assess the modern conservative movement a generation or two from now, among the most severe tarnishes on the GOP’s legacy will be Guantanamo and record deficits. There also will be the string of painfully ignorant policies the party has held on HIV/AIDS. To his credit, George W. Bush has probably done more than any conservative politician of his generation to reverse this tragic legacy — more, perhaps, than any liberal politician, too. PEPFAR has provided life-sustaining anti-AIDS drugs to 1.4 million patients in the countries hardest hit by the disease. It may be the most favorably remembered foreign policy initiative of Bush’s entire tenure. And in his January State of the Union address, the President proposed a long-overdue doubling of the effort.
It looked as though the GOP had finally found its moorings on combating a disease that, in a number of African countries, now affects more than 1 in 5 adults. But a small GOP minority once again appears poised to force the United States to take a backseat in the fight. As Gerson says, it will come at a price paid in lives. Unfortunately, it won’t be the first time.
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