Florida Agenda

“Unfortunately, They are Serving “

On September 21, 2010, I attended a candidate’s forum hosted by the Pompano Beach Civic Association to listen to a friend running for the Florida State House. I showed up dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and upon entering the auditorium; I quickly realized that there was going to be more to the evening’s line up. I had then just learned that Allen West was going to be speaking, well it explained a lot, including the need to mentally prepare myself to brave the insanity and to sit through an evening in an auditorium with hate-filled fear-mongering homophobes and tea baggers.

While I can’t wait for this election season to end, until it’s over, I’m mustering up the energy to help pro-equality Congressman Ron Klein get re-elected to Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. His right-wing extremist challenger, who actually lives in Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s district and can not vote for himself, decided to try and carpetbag his way into the district. It’s been reported that West has been showered with Tea Party campaign funds from all over the country. The fight for this congressional district has the potential to serve as a barometer as to whether LGBTQI-Americans have any hopes to advance legislative efforts for equality in the next session of the United States Congress.

While Congressman Klein was in Washington, D.C. performing the job he was elected for, his opponent, disgraced Colonel Allen West, spoke to the civic association about his campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. In my question [to West], I included Eric Alva’s name when I spoke about LGBT-men and women risking their lives, why should they not have the same right to serve? West’s response, as expected, just infuriated me and all I could think was “run fat boy, run.”

Below is a transcript of my question and West’s response:

Michael Rajner:

There are men and women risking their lives on a daily basis for this nation, just like you did. Why should they also not have the right to serve in our nation’s military?

Allen West:

Well unfortunately, they are serving, you just said that. But the thing I think you are looking at is, the military, the mission of the military is not to accommodate sexual behavior. Let me tell you something as a commander. I fined people for not having the proper haircut.

And so I appreciate any American that goes in and serves, but let me tell you something about me as a heterosexual in the military. I couldn’t even walk in my uniform holding my wife’s hand unless it was an official formal ceremony. So there are some rules and restrictions.

You know how many years you can go to jail in the military for committing adultery? Do we have that in the civilian world? You can go to a military prison for 18 months for committing adultery. The United States military is a different society then the society we have here and I think the most important thing that we need to be focusing on, we have been in Afghanistan for 9 years and we are still fighting major combat operations, that is where the focus should be so that we don’t have double amputees, be it heterosexual or gay, coming back to the United States of America.

Please help me re-elect one of our proequality champions in the United States Congress. Congressman Klein has stepped up to the plate when it comes to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and HIV/AIDS-related issues. Now it’s time for the LGBTQIA-community to step up to the plate and make certain we send our pro-equality champions back to the Unites States Congress for our community to move forward.

Like you, I’m angry and I’m frustrated, but now is not the time for the pity party. Now is the time to channel all that anger into something constructive. Misdirected anger will only get us a Congress being strangled by the Tea Party right-wing extremists who would rather us be shunned from society to die unemployed, homeless and ill.

Activist Rajner attends Ceremony with the President

(Photo: Courtesy of Michael Emanuel Rajner)

BY DMITRY RASHNITSOV

In the United States, approximately 56,000 people become infected with HIV each year and more than 1.1 million Americans are living with HIV.  To combat this growing epidemic, the White House released the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) and accompanying NHAS Federal Implementation Plan.

Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius also announced that $30 million of the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention Fund will be dedicated to the implementation of the NHAS.  This funding will support the development of combination prevention interventions.  It will also support improved surveillance, expanded and targeted testing, and other activities.

“We can’t afford complacency – not when in the ten minutes I’ve been talking to you, another American has just contracted HIV,” Secretary Sebelius said.  “That’s why our strategy calls for aggressive efforts to educate Americans about how dangerous this disease still is and the steps they can take to protect themselves and their loved ones.”

The vision of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy is to make the United States “a place where new HIV infections are rare, and when they do occur, every person, regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or socio-economic circumstance will have unfettered access to high-quality, life-extending care, free from stigma and discrimination.”

The NHAS has three primary goals:

1) Reducing  the number of new infections;

2) Increasing access to care and optimizing health outcomes for people living with HIV;

3) Reducing HIV-related health disparities;

“Now, it’s been nearly 30 years since a Center for Disease Control publication called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report first documented five cases of an illness that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS,” President Barack Obama said. “In the beginning, of course, it was known as the “gay disease” — a disease surrounded by fear and misunderstanding; a disease we were too slow to confront and too slow to turn back.

In the decades since — as epidemics have emerged in countries throughout Africa and around the globe — we’ve grown better equipped, as individuals and as nations, to fight this disease.”

To accomplish these goals, the NHAS calls for a more coordinated national response to the HIV epidemic and includes a NHAS Federal Implementation Plan that outlines key, short-term actions to be undertaken by the federal government to execute the outlined recommendations.  Additionally, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum directing agencies to take specific steps to implement this strategy.

Since taking office, President Obama’s administration has taken extraordinary steps to engage the public to evaluate what we are doing right and identify new approaches that will strengthen our response to the domestic epidemic.  The Office of National AIDS Policy hosted 14 HIV/AIDS Community Discussions with thousands of Americans across the U.S. and reviewed suggestions from the public via the White House website.  ONAP also organized a series of expert meetings on several HIV-specific topics, and worked with Federal and community partners who organized their own meetings to support the development of a national strategy.

Fort Lauderdale HIV/AIDS activist Michael Emanuel Rajner attended a presentation at the White House last week that coincided with the announcement. He came back thinking that Obama is working to help those affected with HIV/AIDS.

“While I have yet to have the chance to read the strategy and implementation documents, based on the presentation, I’m confident that our President and his administration are working incredibly hard to address the domestic crisis of HIV/AIDS,” Rajner said. “The President and his administration have openly shared that the plan is not perfect, but it is a starting point for our nation to fix its infrastructure and, in tough economic times, make certain agencies are held accountable.”

Rajner said he had a chance to tell the president personally how much he appreciated his work.

“While President Obama spoke, he parted the gray clouds that have dismissed the anguish and tears of so many of my brothers and sisters,” Rajner said. “As a gay man living with AIDS, I was proud to stand in the White House and say, “Thank you Mr. President” as I shook his hand. My soul that has been tortured for so long from silence, I began to heal from some of that pain.”

Also, Rajner stated that Florida Gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink committed to developing a state strategy for HIV/AIDS while speaking before the Florida GLBT Democratic Caucus last week.

HIV/AIDS Patients living in fear that they will

soon lose access to their lifesaving HIV-medications

MICHAEL EMANUEL RAJNER, BSW (Photo)

I am in Washington, D.C. to attend an event celebrating the successful repeal of an age old ban prohibiting the use of federal funds for syringe-exchange programs and to also honor the amazing contributions of those involved in the effort.

The visit to Washington, D.C. is planned to be a joyful one, but as I prepare for the trip, I could not help but pack my schedule with visits with members of Congress and their staff as the sky continues to fall for some people living with HIV/AIDS.

While I will be there to celebrate and honor the work of great activists to repeal a ban based on ideology and not science, I will also be pounding the marble floors of Congress and serve as a voice to calling on members of Congress to provide $126 million in emergency funding for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP).

With the passing of each day, more and more people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States are living with increasing fear that they will soon lose access to their lifesaving HIV-medications as our nation continues to struggle with its economy. Ten states (Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming) have capped enrollment of their ADAP and established waiting lists with more than 1,000 people waiting for access to their lifesaving medications.

As states continue to slash AIDS program budgets and leave some of their most economically vulnerable residents on the cutting room floor, the number of people waiting for access is quickly expected to soar beyond the 2004 record of 1,629 people on waiting lists. As this crisis continues to plague our nation, we’re reminded that America has AIDS and despite medications people are still dying while public health programs are operating at capacity and fail to be funded at the levels to sustain the actual need.

Pharmaceutical advertisements of an HIV+ person climbing a mountain only clouds the issue and doesn’t show the daily struggle of many lives in dire need to secure medications, yet they have no accessible means.

In the case of South Carolina, for three people with HIV/AIDS the ADAP wait list once again defined HIV/AIDS as a death sentence. Three residents of South Carolina have already perished as the state fails to respect every life and ignores the basic needs of their lowincome residents.

Back in November 20, 2006, I participated in a demonstration in Columbia, South Carolina to demand their state legislature adequately fund their state’s ADAP as hundreds of impoverished residents living with HIV/AIDS went without the most basic of lifesaving medications. At the time I served as the national secretary for the Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA) and drove up from Fort Lauderdale.

Caravans from neighboring states found refuge for a good night’s sleep on a church floor. In the morning, the army that gathered would take to the streets and marched to stand by their forgotten brothers and sisters.

Two weeks later, I remember speaking on stage in New Orleans at NAPWA’s once annual conference, ‘Staying Alive.’ When speaking to the audience of nearly 500 people living with HIV/AIDS from around the county, I knew then I’d found my voice as I called on a segment of the HIV/AIDS community to take action while on their daily struggle with this insidious virus.

Just before I was invited to the stage, Reverend Charles King called Karen Bates of South Carolina and told her to listen; he then put up his BlackBerry so she can hear her community – a family united by despair – respond to the call to action. As I spoke with anger and despair in my voice, I was clear to remind each person in that room of their duty to themselves and their peers.

There was a time when LGBT organizations were on the front line demanding our government respond to

the needs of dying gay men.

Defying social norms, segments of our community motivated by compassion and the need for every person to die with dignity engaged in direct actions involving civil disobedience. For many who engaged, they had a friend or loved one who was at home and probably forgotten by their family. Others may not have had a personal experience of someone struggling, they just knew they needed to get out there and fight for others.

Over the next few weeks I will be following the struggle that over 1,000 people living with HIV/AIDS are having while on a waiting list for their lifesaving medications. Stay tuned and ready to respond to a ‘call for action!’