No need to lionize him

I suppose I should say something about GHW “Poppy” Bush, who died last Friday and had a state funeral yesterday. There are lots of media voices willing to extol about his virtues and have done so at length this week. I don’t need to repeat all that gushing (nor could my fingers survive wading through it all), though I’ll repeat the comment that he is considered the last “good” Republican president before they turned bad (starting with his son).

Some are saying that the GOP turned bad because of him (Newt Gingrich rose in power in response to Poppy). Some are also saying the Religious Right rose in power in reaction to him – it was in the 1992 GOP Convention that I heard derogatory comments about LGBT people from a convention speaker (Pat Buchanan?), turning me solidly away from the party.

However, there were signs of the current GOP trajectory under Saint Ronald and even before.

Back in 1988 I voted for GHW Bush – I was still young and stupid then. For half of his presidency I lived in Germany. I experience the opening of the Berlin Wall as well as what the Germans thought of the 1990 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. I did not vote for him in 1992. I saw he had accumulated a very high approval rating from that war – and squandered it. He could have done a great deal with such high approval. Instead he did nothing with it.

On to a couple voices that you won’t here amongst all those talking heads – the LGBT voice and the progressive voice.

The LGBT voice is brought by Chris Johnson in an article for the Washington Blade that was reprinted in Between the Lines. Johnson talked to Barney Frank, a former Congressman who is gay, and Urvashi Vaid, who was executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force during Bush’s years in office.

Frank mentioned such things as gays banned from serving in the military (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell appeared under Clinton) saying, “Bush was simply unsupportive on any issue.” The two pro-LGBT bills that Bush signed were because Congress had packaged them so that Bush had no choice.

One bill was the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which required the Department of Justice to collect data on hate crimes and included sexual orientation as one of the categories. This was only to collect data. Having the DoJ actually prosecute those crimes had to wait until Obama signed the Matthew Shepherd & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

The other bill was the Immigration Act of 1990, part of which repealed a 1952 law that banned “homosexual or sex perverts” – any LGBT people from entering the United States. The repeal was worked out in Congress and part of a larger package.

Vaid said, “I think that that administration pandered to the right wing in the Republican Party and did not stand up to it and allowed itself to do a lot of things. The president allowed himself to be led by people who were far-right zealots like Patrick Buchanan.”

The AIDS epidemic prompted protests by the activist group ACT UP. One of their protests was outside the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush said they showed an “excess of free speech” and were totally counterproductive.

Bush did sign the Ryan White Care Act, which provided health coverage for low-income people with HIV/AIDS. But he signed it only in response to the protests by such groups as ACT UP.

George Bush was not supportive. In contrast, his wife Barbara was. In one memorable scene at an AIDS home in DC she hugged two people with AIDS, an infant and a gay man.

In a Twitter thread Leah McElrath talks of Bush’s response to the AIDS epidemic and adds:

Large swaths from within two generations of gay men were wiped out. Approximately 200,000 from 1981-1993. Just think about that. The impact of the loss. Not only at a personal level, but for the LGBTQ community and culture and for the nation as a whole.

The progressive voice is that of Mark Sumner of Daily Kos. Sumner gives a bit of biography of Bush, then discusses why he is not any better than the rest of the GOP crowd. Sumner provides a little quote showing Bush didn’t try to hide his racism:

"The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14% of the people. I'm also worried about the other 86%." — George H. W. Bush, explaining why he voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964

Meaning he was just fine with Tyranny of the Majority.

Bush vetoed the 1990 Civil Rights Act that would have supported the 1964 law that the Supreme Court was undermining. His actions towards women didn’t match his support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Sumner wrote:

Rather than lionize Bush, let’s hear from a lion.

“He is more interested in appeasing extremists in his party than in providing simple justice for working Americans.” — Ted Kennedy