Source: Donald Moffett: He Kills Me, 1987, poster. From a touring art exhibit Act-Up New York.
AMERICA BLOG
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tonight issued a long statement about HIV/AIDS, in response to the uproar over mistaken comments she made at Nancy Reagan’s funeral on Friday.
At the funeral, Clinton told MSNBC that Nancy and Ronald Reagan helped start a national conversation about HIV/AIDS. Hillary retracted the statement and apologized a few hours later, saying she confused Nancy Reagan’s legacy on stem cells (in which she did take a courageous stand) with her record on AIDS.
In fact, the Reagan administration dropped the ball on the AIDS epidemic — Reagan refused to even mention the disease for years — and Nancy Reagan herself turned away a deathbed request from her longtime friend Rock Hudson, who was then dying from complications related to AIDS.
When I first watched Clinton’s statement yesterday I was mad. Oh hell, I was furious. I only lost one friend to HIV in 1991, my friend Paul Clark who helped me come out, and was the inspiration of much of my political work over the past two decades. But I have friends who lost far more. And I just couldn’t understand how Hillary could say that the Reagans were some kind of AIDS heroes. Why would she say that?
The only explanation that makes sense is that she screwed up. She misspoke. She was tired. She was sick. She was asked a question she didn’t know the answer to. Or that she simply got confused. There is no explanation that makes sense other than this. Or else, as I noted, she wouldn’t have immediately apologized. She would have stuck to her guns. She would have given some lame defense. And she didn’t. She fessed up and asked forgiveness.But this morning I woke up, thought more about it, and I wasn’t angry any longer — simply because Hillary’s comments didn’t make sense. She’s not Rush Limbaugh. She has an excellent record on LGBT rights. She has along LGBT action plan on her campaign site, that includes a lot about AIDS, so she clearly cares about the issue. (There’s nothing about HIV/AIDS on Sanders’ much-shorter LGBT page.) So why would she say something so stupid? Was she trying to woo GOP voters, pulling a Sista Souljah on us over HIV? Not only was that unlikely, but she immediately repudiated the comments and apologized — that’s not something you do if the comments were coldly calculated to woo the other side of the aisle.
It’s been a bad week for Democratic presidential candidates. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton suggested that the Reagans were good on AIDS, seriously ticking off the gays. While only days before, Bernie Sanders claimed that white people have never experienced poverty, and that most African-Americans come from the ghetto. So if we’re going to write off Hillary as a homophobe, then we need to equally write off Bernie as a racist. And since I have no interest in seeing President Trump sworn in next January, I’m willing to call it a draw.
Here is Secretary Clinton’s statement in full
