“When AIDS Was Funny”

June 2, 2019         “When AIDS Was Funny”    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Using never-before-heard audio tapes from three separate press conferences, in 1982, 1983, and 1984, When AIDS Was Funny illustrates how the reporter Lester Kinsolving, a conservative (and not at all gay-friendly) fixture in the White House press corps, was consistently scoffed at when he posed urgent questions about the AIDS epidemic. With snickering, homophobic jokes and a disturbing air of uninterest, Speakes dismisses Kinsolving’s concerns about the escalating problem. “Lester was known as somewhat of a kook and a crank (many people still feel the same way),” says Calonico. “But, at the time, he was just a journalist asking questions only to be mocked by both the White House and his peers.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan-administration-response-to-aids-crisis?fbclid=IwAR33gu3XlV9_dHdClTlKuVzpMfK7OXK99fY6gq-5StypzGIy5CfSw8ZoghM

Yes, it was 1981 when the White House spokesperson, Larry Speakes, made fun of the first reporter who asked about the Regan Administration’s response to the AIDS crisis. Speakes continued for more than a year to make gay taunting jokes, aimed at the reporter, Lester Kinsolving, whenever the topic was brought up. 

Now, Ronald Regan is remembered as a hero of Republican politics and even though we might say a lot about how his tax policies is that destroyed the middle class and killed off the American dream, I want to drill down today on this specific issue of the early federal response to the discovery of AIDS.

You can say this recording we played was from 1981, nearly two generations ago. Times were different and people were not nearly as woke as we would expect a national politician to be today. But like most of you, I remember 1981. I was in my second year of grad school at Vanderbilt, still plagued by the curse of my hillbilly upbringing that did not prepare me either in spelling or grammar, to write papers for my Vanderbilt professors. I apologize for the redaction…. In those days they put our Social Security Number on the front of our university IDs.

My rural Kentucky education left me in a position of deficit in many areas of cultural awareness, but I can tell you this, even at the age of 25, emerging from a cesspool of Appalachian prejudices, I knew better than to make fun of someone for being gay, or to imply that being gay was a bad thing.

This is not scientific research in any way, it is a purely anecdotal reflection, but I am just saying that even though it was 40 years ago, a barely out of the woods Kentucky hillbilly knew that the AIDS crisis was serious and anything but a laughing matter, but someone who had been the governor of California and was then the President of the United States, did not know:  and that is a sobering contrast.  

More than 600,000 Americans have died from AIDS since 1981. Millions more are HIV+. It is difficult to tell how a quick and decisive response to AIDS when it was first identified might have changed the course of history but we might assume that as many as a half a million people have died due to the derisive and irresponsible policies of the Regan administration, and tens of millions are living with the HIV virus who might have been spared this serious health challenge if they had cared about the lives of gay people in a humane manner. 

Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said (and maybe he did, but if he did, he was loosely quoting a German writer), “The death of one person is tragic. The death of two million is a statistic.”

No matter who said it first, it is an observation worth thinking about.  Our friend, Dan Goodwin, has talked about his time in management in Walmart when, if an employee shoplifted a candy bar on their way to the breakroom, they could be arrested and handcuffed and escorted off of the property. 

Again, shop lifting at Walmart earns you a criminal record, willfully and negligently ignoring the rise and spread of AIDS such that more than 600,000 mostly gay Americans die . . . and you get federal buildings, highways, and schools named after you and two generations of politicians want to claim to be the inheritors of your legacy. One person shop-lifting at Walmart is a tragedy, 600,000 dead homosexuals is a statistic, and one that fans of Regan will become indignant about if you remind them of it! 

And here is the rub for me, and I hope for all of you: it is up to the church, specifically the progressive church, to be prophetic truth tellers. Not to hate dead presidents but to adamantly assert that we will not stand idly by when minorities are oppressed, when the plight of the poor is ignored, or when governments, our own or any other, start wars under unjust circumstances.

Again, in 2001 when the Bush administration first beat the drums of war against Afghanistan and then Iraq, I was railing against the wars from the elevated pulpit in a local denominational church and one of the sweetest little old ladies in the world called me and said through her thick Southern accent, “Now Roger, you know that I love you and that I think you are just about the smartest man I have ever known. But do you really believe that you know more than our president about whether or not we should go to war?”

And I get it . . . I was just a preacher in southern Missouri who evidently had not learned that you don’t wear a short-sleeved shirt with a tie and, God forbid, matching suspenders. George H. W. Bush was a national executive with the wisdom of the CIA and the FBI and advisors from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines . . . who was I to second guess him? With some real trepidation, I replied, “Yes, Mrs. Ann Routt, I do believe that in this case, I know better than the president of the United States.” Not that I had information that Bush didn’t have, but . . . well, you know the ancient proverb that may go all of the way back to Erasmus: in the land of the blind, the one 

eyed man is king. I promise not to make a habit of using myself as the historical yardstick of life but, at 62, I’ve been around for almost as much history as Forest Gump. 

Bush certainly had more information than I had but, as seems unavoidable at this point, he was willing to ignore facts, manufacture propaganda, and orchestrate or at least bless wars that have killed more than a quarter of a million innocent citizens.

Yes, the 3000 Americans killed on 9-11 were innocent and in no way deserved the fate that befell them. But then, do you think that peasant farmers in Afghanistan, children playing the in streets of Bagdad, university students in Iraq are any less innocent than the people who had gone to work on the wrong day in September of 2001? Yes, like anyone, I was and am horrified by the murderous terrorism committed against the United States on that day…. But our military response to people who had nothing to do with it has killed very nearly a hundred times as many innocent people and we seem to be somehow inured to that fact.

One American death is a tragedy but a quarter of a million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, . . . well, is it even a statistic if no one ever mentions it?

Look, people, I take no pleasure in saying this but please indulge me. Before 9-11, Vice President Dick Cheney was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq. George Bush, for reasons that defy rational explanation, went along with a case for war based on cooked intelligence married to pure and obviously false propaganda. And then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, took that fake propaganda to the United Nations and sold this war to the world.

Again, I am not trying to be pedantic here: shoplift at Walmart, taken away in handcuffs . . . commit war crimes that kill hundreds of thousands of people, cost the American tax payer more than $2 trillion, and you get to go on lecture tours being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per appearance. 

I went to hear Colin Powell speak at MSU, right here in town, just a few years ago. I fully expected to hear him show serious remorse for his own role in lying to the world to start an illegal war but what I heard was a man who nearly broke his own arm patting himself on the back for his role in history. 

And, you know I am not exaggerating, his narcissistic diatribe was regularly interrupted by thunderous applause, cheers and a standing ovation. 2014, a decade after his malevolent and disastrous performance at the United Nations, and no mention was made of his heinous war crimes and he was greeted at our state university as a hero and held up as a role model. For obvious reasons, there were no live questions taken from the audience, just pre-prepared, fawning, sycophant, soft-ball questions on note cards. . . which is to say, they didn’t read my questions.

All of this is obviously relevant to our situation today. Though we have obviously taken great strides from the time when the Regan administration thought that AIDS was funny, but please don’t think that the battle is over. During the Obama administration, it became legal for gay people to get married and for members of the armed forces to come out of the closet. In the past two years, the Trump administration has done what they can to roll back progress in these areas. Trans members of the armed forces have suffered a reversal of policies in the military, under the excuse that gender reassignment surgery provided by the military was too expensive, ignoring the fact that the military spends ten times as much on erectile dysfunction prescription meds for men in the military as they spend on transgender healthcare.

And, if you are the kind of person who keeps track of such things; Trump’s golf trips have cost tax payers ten times as much as both the military expenditures on ED pills and transgender soldiers’ healthcare. . . . more than $3 million per weekend golf outing, most of which is being paid to resorts that he owns. I have never been terribly interested in learning how to play golf, but if I could pocket a couple of million dollars every time I went out on the links, I might develop an interest.  

But, if I may return for a moment to my conversation with Mrs. Ann Routt, some 16 years ago. She was, in the most polite and loving way possible, not really challenging my facts in stating that the president was lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or some squirrelly connection between Saddam Hussein and nuclear material and Al Qaida, she was simply asking me to stay in my lane. I could talk about the Bible all I wanted. I could even talk about sin. I could talk about addiction, divorce, infidelity, and shop-lifting at Walmart, I just wasn’t supposed to talk about the murder of 600,000 innocent civilians. That is out of my jurisdiction. 

And here is both my summation of what is wrong with almost every church in America . . . the thing that I implore you never to do. While Erasmus was essentially right, the one-eyed person in the land of the blind might well be the king. But the blind might really prefer that the one-eyed person would just shut up.

Or as the modern take on the proverb goes: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.

It was not politically expedient for the media to press the Regan administration about the fact that they were ignoring the spread of AIDS when they could have stopped it. 

It was not politically expedient for the media to call “BS” on Cheney, Bush, and Powell in the lead up to our nation’s two insane wars. It is not currently politically expedient to talk about the fact that Russia seriously hacked our 2016 presidential election, very probably with the help of the Trump campaign. It is not politically expedient to talk about Trump’s involvement in money laundering for the Russian mafia, about illegal emoluments in the form of loans, and real estate deals with Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is not even politically expedient to ask Bob Mueller why, even if he felt that he could not indict a sitting president, why we was willing to indict 32 people, including George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, Richard Pinedo, Alex Van der Zwaan, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone, but never even call in to be interviewed such obviously involved up to their necks characters like:

Don Trump, Jr., Jarrod Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. 

All I’m saying is that politically expedience has nothing to do with who we are. In fact, if you do fit in, in a society as saturated in lies and corruption as ours is, then I would suggest that is proof that there is something wrong. . . something spiritually and morally wrong. 

Thomas Paine wrote on the steps of the great American Revolution that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” That is, this sort of crisis reveals who we really are.  When we started this church, we wanted to be a prophetic voice for social justice expressed in an honest and academic theology. We had no idea what would happen to our country in our first decade of existence. Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, “History has found us.” The eight years of the Obama administration, when we were just getting our legs under us, were scandal free halcyon days compared to the present. 

We didn’t predict how history would unfold. We didn’t accurately envision what our role in it would be, but these are the times that try the souls of women and men. We didn’t go looking for this fight but, history has found us. 

The media is hardly proven themselves to be reliable. Even the much lauded, Bob Mueller, has shown himself to have some real feet of clay, and a Congress that has sworn to uphold the constitution that is the basis of our democracy, seems not to know what it says, or at least they are unwilling to follow its dictates into the inconvenience of a politically fraught battle. Into this vacuum of leadership, honesty, integrity, and courage we really must go. Without the prophetic voice of communities of faith, there really isn’t much hope. History has found us, and we must stand up and meet this moment.