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| George H.W. Bush wasn't much a hero to the LGBTQ community during his presidency. |
George H. W. Bush blew GOP’s last chance to abandon anti-LGBTQ extremism - President George H.W. Bush died last weekend and while I said be nice, I didn't say lie about his history in regards to LGBTQ equality. You can be nice and truthful at the same time. He was a good man to many people and his family loved him. But he wasn't as much of a hero as he COULD have been to the LGBTQ community.
The Media Is Erasing George H.W. Bush’s Catastrophic Harm To LGBTQ People - Michelangelo Signorile breaks it down.
The HIV Epidemic Won’t End Until We Address Health Disparities In Communities Of Color - Point blank, amen.
Anti-LGBTQ pediatrician was called out in 2017 for error-filled post on transgender community - Post from last night. The targets of the anti-LGBTQ industry may change, but the tactics and lies don't. Neither do the condemnations when they are caught lying.
Lesbian couple made to quit jobs for being ‘too gay’ - So much mess the LGBTQ community continues to fight against.
Pope Francis says gay life has become ‘fashionable’ and is hurting the Catholic Church - Really? Don't blame us for fallacies in the Catholic church.
2 comments:
You are thoughtful and generous on your comments on George Bush. This is close to how I think a lot of people felt when Mrs Thatcher died, but it was hard to say that without sounding like you were defending her policies.
The need to divide all politicians into heroes and villains does a lot of harm.
My take is that while G.H.W. Bush was a man of integrity (unlike 45), he was also conveniently hypocritical.
George H.W. Bush extended Ronald Reagan's legacy of cultural conservatism mostly for political expediency. In fact, the Bushes were open supporters of Planned Parenthood before they made a very sharp right turn to join the Reagan White House. In 1990, when then-PFLAG President Paulette Goodman sent then First Lady Barbara Bush a request for a letter of support. It was done mostly as a courtesy, and its unclear whether Goodman seriously expected a reply, but amazingly, Barbara Bush sent a personal response: "I firmly believe that we cannot tolerate discrimination against any individuals or groups in our country," Mrs. Bush wrote. "Such treatment always brings with it pain and perpetuates intolerance." Somehow the statement found its way to the Associated Press, which then published it. That sent the self-titled religious right into orbit.
The Bushes were also official witnesses at a same-sex wedding in 2013, at a time when the Republican party was still trying to prevent marriage equality from becoming the law of the land.
The reality is that G.H.W. Bush and his wife did not feel particularly strong about anti-gay behavior, seeing it more as a personal issue and not one that government needed to be involved in. But his administration had plenty of people who aimed to appease social conservatives by throwing LGBT people under the bus. He was the last U.S. leader from the so-called "Greatest" generation, and that generation grew up with very different expectations for personal conduct than Baby Boomers. In the end, I don't feel a sense of any loss over the passing of George H.W. Bush, although I acknowledge he was better than some of the nutcases who now proudly call themselves Republicans.
The entire "liberation" of Kuwait was bogus. Kuwait was an oil-producing Kingdom, not a functioning democracy, and its people were never free even before the Iraq invasion. At the same time, the U.S. chose to ignore other countries that were invaded by hostile neighbors (among them were some former Yugoslavian republics, as well as Sudan) simply because they weren't oil-rich or because we didn't want to piss Russia off. Both were bad reasons for liberating an unfree oil dynasty. As for his indifference to the LGBT community, that's also well-documented, although his wife famously pissed of the so-called religious right when she
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