Why Announcing a Nancy Reagan Stamp During Pride Month Is So Galling
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The Biden administration’s announcement of a Nancy Reagan postal stamp during pride month is so tone deaf, I am speechless.
Except that it is yet another example of why the Democratic party sucks so bad.
First lady Jill Biden next week will help unveil a new postal stamp to honor former first lady Nancy Reagan, the White House announced Wednesday.
Biden will host the event on Monday at the White House. She’ll be joined by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy; Fred Ryan, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation; and Anne Peterson, who is Nancy Reagan’s niece.
As first lady, Reagan founded the “Just Say No” anti-drug program as her major initiative and promoted the awareness campaign to children throughout her husband’s two terms in office. She also previously served as first lady of California while her husband was governor.
To call Nancy and her husband Ronald’s stance during the AIDS epidemic problematic is almost laughable. Almost because there’s nothing to funny about it.
And this isn’t the first time the Democrats have gone all in Mrs. Reagan. In 2016 Hillary Clinton famously praised Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for having started the American conversation about AIDS “when, before, nobody talked about it.”
President Reagan’s first speech on the subject wasn’t until May 31, 1987. By then, more than twenty-five thousand people, the majority of them gay men, had died in the United States. His Administration ridiculed people with aids—his spokesman, Larry Speakes, made jokes about them at press conferences—and while I do think it rude to speak ill of the dead, particularly on the day of a funeral, this issue cannot be ignored. Nancy Reagan refused to act in any way in 1985 to help her friend Rock Hudson when he was in Paris dying of aids. (Last year, Buzzfeed published documents that make this clear.)
Clinton’s comments caused an outcry and she apologized rapidly, writing, in a statement issued on Twitter, “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and aids. For that, I’m sorry.” She deserves recognition for that. But her correction, while not nearly as offensive as her earlier comments, was also misguided.
The idea that Ronald Reagan finally did focus on aids, if only belatedly, is also a fiction. Reagan was outraged in 1986, when his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, one of the great heroes of the aids epidemic, issued a report that, as I wrote when Koop died, recommended a program of compulsory sex education in schools and argued that, by the time they reached third grade, children should be taught how to use condoms.
In 1990, when Ryan White died of aids, Reagan wrote a letter that ended with the words, “Ryan, my dear young friend, we will see you again.” But that letter really just shows the limits of Reagan’s sympathy. Ryan White was an absolutely delightful Indiana schoolboy who, in the early nineteen-eighties, received a transfusion of H.I.V.-infected blood. So he was an “innocent” aids victim, unlike the gay men Reagan did not like to mention. It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable singling White out to honor, nor is it by chance that the single biggest piece of H.I.V. legislation ever enacted in the United States is called the Ryan White Act. If the boy had happened to be a gay teen-ager, does anyone think Ronald Reagan would have written that letter? (I want to stress that this is not meant in any way to diminish the courage of Ryan White, whom I knew and wrote about more than thirty years ago. He was a wonderful person. It wasn’t his fault that he happened to be a straight white teen-ager from the Midwest, rather than a gay man from San Francisco.)
In the end, as Clinton wrote, Nancy Reagan was indeed “strong” on stem-cell research and on Alzheimer’s disease. Her conversion came when her husband plunged into the darkness of the disease. She was desperate, and would have done anything for him. It was a deeply admirable stance, and rare in her conservative world. Millions of other people, however, would surely have benefitted from that kind of support—had she offered it when her husband was capable of doing something to help alleviate so much suffering.
