According to an article published in the Minneapolis Star-Ledger, "gay activist" David Benkof says George W. Bush has done more to fight HIV/AIDS than any president in American history, including Clinton.

"The people pushing Bush to fight the epidemic at home and abroad are overwhelmingly conservative Christians -- the same people we keep hearing gay leaders tar as narrow-minded and bigoted," Benkof writes. "Well, those narrow-minded bigots (who never had the president's ear during the Clinton administration) deserve far more credit for relieving suffering from HIV in this decade than gay men and lesbians did in the previous two decades combined."

Under George W. Bush, Benkof writes:

•The United States spends more than $3 billion a year, with more to come, on the president's initiative to treat, prevent and care for millions of suffering people worldwide. Bush's AIDS plan is the largest health initiative ever dedicated to a single disease. By contrast, Clinton's last budget contained less than a billion dollars total for both domestic prevention and global AIDS. And instead of trying to help people get the medicine they needed, Clinton's Justice Department actually sued people and governments worldwide for trying to produce generic antiretrovirals.

•The White House is trying to repeal the heinous restriction on foreign visitors and immigrants with HIV, a policy the supposedly progay Clinton administration actually signed into law. Because of Bush, we may finally have international AIDS conferences in our country again, something that never happened in the pervious administration.

•The president has not hesitated to appoint openly gay experts on the disease to top administration positions, including physician Mark R. Dybul to an ambassador-level HIV post and both National AIDS Policy Coordinator Scott Evertz and his successor, Joseph O'Neill. If bigoted Christians were pulling the strings at the Bush administration, why does Bush keep promoting openly gay men? By contrast, President Clinton had no openly gay AIDS czars. Bush's AIDS appointments aren't about winning gay votes any more than his appointment of two African-American secretaries of state was calculated to win black votes. He wants the most qualified people doing important jobs, whatever their identities.

So, who is the author of these claims - the so-called gay activist David Benkof? Officially, Benkof describes himself as gay Republican. Benkof, as David Bianco, lived as a gay man and was actively involved in gay news distribution, serving as founder and contributor to Q-Syndicate from 1995 to 2003. Then in 2003, Bianco announced that he had made some changes in his life. He had changed his identity to bisexual, his religion to Orthodox Judaism, his beliefs about homosexual acts to be unacceptable, his goals to include marriage to a nice Jewish girl, and his name to Benkof. He then went off to Israel for some years to study. And now he's reemerged and is seeking to be influential in the restriction of gay rights and equality.

Read more about this questionable character here.

Last update: 01-29-2009 20:58