Letters to the Editor
-
A question I think would be interesting to ask
The Reverand...and notice, I'm not saying we should ask Obama.
Many people have brought up the fact that it is rational, in the context of the Tuskegee Experiment, for Reverend Wright, other black leaders and members of the black community to believe that the government would, in fact, unleash this on them on purpose.
What I'd like to ask the Reverend, since he's the one who is now most famous for the topic, is what did he think when AIDs was first discovered? You know, when it was considered the gay disease, and all the right-wing preachers were saying this was a plague that the gay community had brought on itself. At that point, if everyone recalls, the only people considered in danger were the gay male community, a few hemopheliacs who might have gotten blood transfusions before they tested the blood supply (Ryan White, if you recall) and intravenous drug users who shared needles with the infected - who would have to be gay male intravenous drug users, and yes, there were some. However, if I recall the attidtude of most the black ministry at the time, it was, there are no black gay males. It was remarkably, well, short-sighted, along with most of the rest of America.
I recall it pretty well because my brother, who is gay, eventually left the city he was living in in the early 1990s after many of the people he knew died of AIDs. It is interesting that my brother does not believe that the government deliberately released AIDs into the gay population. He believes it simply failed to do anything realistic about it, deliberately, under the Reagan and first Bush administrations, until it was too late to save many of the people who were already infected, because of who it was killing - which is a very different thing.
So, what did the Reverend think then? Was he concerned about AIDs at all when it looked like it was confined to the gay community? Or, like the Rev Falwell and others on the other end of the religeous political spectrum, did he think most of America could be unconcerned and they could just watch the gay community get what was coming to it?