MUST READ

A must read is Frank Rich's  Sunday op-ed piece in The New York Times.

He touches on AIDS,  socialite Judith Peabody and Prop 8:

Most of those who do argue for denying marriage equality to gay couples are now careful to say that they really, really like gay people. This, like the states’-rights argument, is a replay of the battle over black civil rights. Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of Reconstruction, recalled last week via e-mail how Strom Thurmond would argue in the early 1960s “that segregation benefited blacks and whites and had nothing to do with racism” — as if inequality were O.K. as long as segregationists pushing separate-but-equal “compromises” claimed their motives were pure.......We are still a young, imperfect, unfinished country. As a young black man working as a nurse in a 1980s AIDS clinic memorably says in Tony Kushner’s epic drama “Angels in America”: “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”