Coronavirus pandemic and AIDS epidemic have one thing in common - being undermined by the same anti-LGBTQ talking head

Gary Bauer

Discussions and arguments comparing the coronavirus pandemic to the AIDS epidemic have left a lot of people bristling. I've chosen to stay out of such a controversial discussion.

That is until today because I found a sad similarity between the two. The American Family Association's online "news" source, One News Now featured an interview with conservative evangelical talking head Gary Bauer. Bauer was spinning the insane notion - without any proof - that Donald Trump's opponents and the media was exploiting the coronavirus epidemic to yank down Trump's approval rating and eventually cost him re-election:

It's just hard to know how many of the American people are buying into this Democrat media narrative that the president reacted to all of this too slowly," he tells OneNewsNow. "The whole charge is ridiculous – but nearly every media outlet in the country is promoting that idea."Bauer doesn't deny that millions of Americans are hurting financially because of the lockdown – but suggests that some of the president's opponents don't have a problem with that.

"Historically even if a president was not responsible for the economic pain, people tend to blame the incumbent of whatever party if they've lost their job, if they've lost their business," he says. "So, this is a huge challenge for the president. [But] some of these people would like to keep things shut as long as possible, because that will mean that on Election Day there won't be enough recovery for voters to reelect the president and vice-president.

By making such a statement, Bauer is spreading false information much like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This filters down to the protests we have seen last weekend and this week by wrong-minded fools whining about how America needs to be "re-opened." And all of it serves to undermine the fight against COVID-19 or the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not new to Bauer. Before making his name as a "pro-family" talking head, Bauer worked in the Reagan Administration.  That was the time when the AIDS virus hit America. Reportedly, Bauer undermined Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's efforts to fight against the epidemic because he felt that it was God's judgment. 

From Right Wing Watch:

Bauer’s role as an anti-gay zealot in the Reagan White House was also revealed in “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite” by D. Michael Lindsay. . . .the book says Bauer interfered with the efforts of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop when he was tasked with drafting a report on AIDS for President Reagan:

 [In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan’s chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

The Right Wing Watch post also details how Bauer attempted to keep gays off of America's first AIDS commission:

A June 30, 1987, memo from Bauer to President Reagan was unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the law firm of McDermott, Will & Emory and the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. The memo, which appears in the December 1 issue of Harper’s, makes clear that Reagan was already aware of Bauer’s opposition to appointing a “known homosexual” to the commission. Bauer may have sensed that he was losing the battle, and felt compelled to tell Reagan one more time just how strongly he felt. Bauer’s arguments were both political and moral. He wrote that it was Reagan’s opponents who were pushing for a gay appointee, and that a gay member of the commission might become a media star who could damage the commission’s work.

So it's indisputable that the AIDS epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic have one fact in common - Gary Bauer is the jackass who has been undermining both of them. But the truly sad fact is that people will most likely forget the damage he is causing to the fight against COVID-19 just as surely as they forgot the damage he caused to the fight against AIDS. And he will retain his undeserved reputation as a "pro-family" advocate.