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From: rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo)
Newsgroups: net.motss,net.politics,net.misc
Subject: Ronald Reagan's Homophobic Career
Message-ID: <1057@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 23-Oct-84 19:13:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: bbncca.1057
Posted: Tue Oct 23 19:13:47 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Oct-84 07:36:23 EDT
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 84


The following is a blatant attempt to influence how you vote on November
6th.  It's addressed to all voters who think they may vote for Reagan,
but especially to closet Republicans, [Ll]ibertarians, and gay people.
(The views expressed herein are my own, & not those of my employer.)


To my mind the foremost reason for not reinstating Ronnie is his
inveterate homophobia.  I wish to dissuade voters who entertain
any of the following notions:

1) Reagan is personally a Nice Guy, free of prejudice himself, but
   politically allied with conspicuous homophobes, whom he ignores
   or tries to contain;

2) Reagan's a bigot, but also a staunch defender of privacy and
   unhampered free enterprise; this, say Libertarians, makes
   civil rights laws redundant & unnecessary (& obnoxious);

3) Reagan is a nasty idiot, who can't tell an "individual right"
   from a hole-in-the-wall, but the direction or EFFECT of his
   administration is beneficial.  No matter how dreadful specific
   Reagan policies, programs, or appointees are, a net good must
   result.

In defense of 1)-3), one could cite two actions:

-- In 1978, in his newspaper column, Reagan was the first major
   California politician to publically oppose the Briggs Initia-
   tive (which would have allowed local school boards to dismiss
   teachers "advocating sexual lifestyle", a phrase which was left
   undefined).  Reagan was out of office then, with no constituents
   to answer to; opposition to the Initiative didn't necessarily
   imply tolerance, but rather a desire not to undercut teachers' 
   authority & most educational and teachers' organizations had 
   already come out publically against the initiative (with an
   eye to his political future, Reagan may've wished to conciliate(?)
   California educators, whom he'd utterly alienated as governor
   by making godawful John Bircher Max Rafferty education czar).

-- It is said (this isn't more than a rather pious rumor) that Reagan
   helped to kill Roger Jepsen's bizarre Family Protection Act by in-
   action, etc.

(A third matter, Terry Dolan's giving THE ADVOCATE, a gay biweekly, 
an interview 2 years ago, for which he caught a lot of flak from 
other Reagan supporters, is in the realm of PR, a pretty shaky 
basis for a belief in Reagan's tolerance).

The truth is that appeal to antihomosexual bigotry has been a staple
of Reagan's political career from its very outset.  In 1967 he cam-
paigned for governor of California largely by obsessively charging
that the University of California at Berkeley was a "hotbed of homo-
sexuality & communism".  This "queer smear" derived entirely from a
nonviolent & rather minor campus controversy:  the editor-in-chief of
the undergraduate paper, The Daily Califorian, had published a series
of articles on homosexuals in the Bay Area.  The series was done in
an objective, social-scientific vein (the editor was a sociology major).
University regents, as timid as ever, ousted him from the editorship,
but the student senate (I think) reinstated him.  Big deal.  Apparently
Reagan thought it was, especially for his political ambitions: he won 
the election.

In 1967 no New Right existed, and the far right had virtually no power
or influence, even locally.  Reagan could not have then been the poli-
tical captive of militantly homophobic supporters.  Altho' fagbaiting
is a venerable tradition in American politics, usually employed in the
desperate final days of a losing campaign to slander opponents by innu-
endo, few politicians have made the blatant, indiscriminate, repeated,
& lengthy use of it that Ronald Reagan has.

		CONTINUED:  MORE DIRT TOMORROW



						Cheers,
						Ron Rizzo


"Why, dahling!  The Left is what's left over, the Right is what's
 wrong, & the Middle-Of-The-Road is no place for a lady."

		    -- Electra Collage, Miss Ballot-box of 1947
		       Washington, AC/DC