Ralph,
I lived in San Francisco in the early 1980's. Not one single gay man I knew from that era is still alive.
All my friends and acquaintances are dead.
Over here in Germany, there was an unbelievable resistance to accepting safe sex, I have precisely two friends my age who, like me are negative. All the rest are dead or were fortunate enough to make it into the cocktail era.
I don't believe the virus was invented by the CIA or the Army or some such to get rid of us. I am convinced that the government under Reagan saw it as, literally, a God-given opportunity to let us die horribly. If Aids had first been found in that group of people who are most commonly afflected with it - heterosexuals, it would have been taken far more seriously and we would not have lost at least 12 years in learning about the disease.
What I was referring to was the use of Negros as "control" groups - Caucasians would receive antibiotics for instance, Negros placebos or nothing. "Scientists" would then follow the progress of diseases in the "control" group. That stopped only when Johnson put an end to it with the final major civil rights reforms.
When you read what the republicans and the christianists are writing, it is very clear that they regard us as the next replacement for dark-skinned people. A constitutional amendment stripping us of civil rights is an unheard of step outside of Nazi Germany and other such places...they know exactly what they are doing and why.
One of the reasons democracy failed in Germany back in the early 1930's was this tendency among progressives and liberals to insist on intellectual purity - everything had to be 100% right or it was a poor compromise. The Nazis, just like the whack jobs who are holding the republicans hostage and the christianists didn't care about getting it right - dead was dead and that was all they cared about. Jews, Roma, devout Catholics, homosexuals, people with mental and physical defects, socialists (the real ones, not what ignorant fools run around calling people whom they don't like), trade union organizers, women who were too emancipated (uppity of them to think they were the equals of men), children born of mixed races...the list goes on and on.
And that is precisely what these monsters in California are trying to do. We have to alert people to how dangerous this is, we must set aside our petty differences and work together. Everytime I read that a Hillary supporter is going to vote for McCain "to show us" I cringe. Everytime someone here says "they're all the same" about politicians or attacks someone for daring not to drink the kool-aid, I wonder why I can't find the Egyptian forum so I, too, can sail my barge down that river, de-neal.
They will win if we don't take action. They know what the stakes are...we need to find a way to explain what's at risk to people, and we need to do it soon.
