By Michelangelo Signorile
www.signorile.com

It was bad enough to learn that 23 percent of gay voters were delusional and self-loathing enough to again vote for George W. Bush, a man who has vowed to make them permanent second-class citizens by tinkering with the Constitution. Perhaps it wasn't all that surprising, since we all know that many of the boys in the Log Cabin Republicans love bending over and taking it long and hard, and seem to have quite a high threshold for abuse. Still, even the Log Cabin leadership—which withheld an endorsement of Bush—must have been thrown by that figure, since it evaporated any bit of bargaining power gay Republicans might have had. Log Cabin ran ads against Bush, spoke out against the federal marriage amendment and even (lightly) defended John Kerry's much-criticized mention of Mary Cheney's lesbianism during the debate. (Actually, they said Kerry should have kept his mouth shut but that Dick Cheney and the Republicans were hypocrites to suddenly start criticizing others as insensitive to gays and lesbians).

Perhaps the Log Cabinites' most memorable and devastating move was to threaten Republicans by noting that if Bush backed the FMA, he risked losing those one million gay voters—25 percent of the total gay vote—who voted for him in 2000 but might not turn out in 2004 without a Log Cabin endorsement.

Yet, even after the FMA, the "moral values" campaign and an unprecedented GOP gay-bashing campaign—and after Log Cabin withheld an endorsement—the exact same number of gay voters (according to the exit polls) cast a vote for Bush, proving that Log Cabin has little influence on anyone.

If it was hideous to learn that so many gay voters supported Bush, finding out that the head of a major gay-founded AIDS advocacy group in Washington is on the Inaugural Committee—thus lending the cause of AIDS activism to Bush's celebration—is completely incomprehensible. It's particularly galling considering the flat-funding of domestic AIDS dollars we've seen come from the Bush administration, as well as the administration's murderous promotion of bogus abstinence-only programs for American teenagers at the expense of condom-education programs. In December, a report released by Rep. Henry Waxman revealed that some abstinence-only programs told kids that HIV could be spread via sweat and tears, and that half of all gay teens were infected—a complete fabrication and a recipe for gay-bashing in our schools.

It's mindboggling that anyone who considered themselves a leader on AIDS would associate their group and cause with so callous a president. But that appears to be the case with AIDS Action's Marsha Martin. On his blog, Direland.com, veteran political journalist Doug Ireland blew the whistle over the holidays on Martin, head AIDS Action, which bills itself as the "voice of action" and claims to lead thousands of AIDS groups as the most powerful AIDS lobby in Washington.

Martin, Ireland writes, has "jumped into bed with the Bush-Rove Republicans with both feet," putting her name on an inaugural celebration that will benefit the deceptively named AIDS Responsibility Project. The ARP is a group that fights the approval and use of generic drugs to treat HIV in poorer nations, allowing Bush's buddies in Big Pharma to make a literal killing on AIDS. ARP, according to Advocate.com, took out a full-page ad in the Bangkok Post, attacking the use of generic drugs by inaccurately claiming they're ineffective. The Center for Media and Democracy describes the ARP as a pharmaceutical industry front group that boasts a "partnership" with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

"Salute a Second Term: Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service: An Inaugural Dinner Invitation," is how the invitation listing Martin's name reads. "You are cordially invited to join in celebrating the Presidential Inauguration and Republican electoral success."

That people like Martin are so easily bought—selling their souls in return for participating in what is being billed as the most expensive inauguration in history—underscores how Bush coopted much of the AIDS movement under his "compassionate conservative" banner, making it appear as if he's done a great deal to combat the epidemic when in fact he's made it worse. Meanwhile, he's got his supporters running the Big Pharma front groups, posing as AIDS activists. ARP is run by Abner Mason, a Log Cabin Republican and Bush supporter who did little to advance the cause against AIDS when he sat on the Presidential AIDS Commission. That panel—created by Bill Clinton and critical of the president's efforts during the Clinton years—has given Bush a rubber stamp since Day One. That's because Bush reconfigured the panel and installed all of his own backers—as he is now doing with the Civil Rights Commission—including many abstinence-only devotees. For a while it was led by Tom Coburn, the viciously antigay former Republican House member who was just elected to the U.S. Senate in Oklahoma after warning the electorate of rampant lesbianism in the state's schools.

Bush and Karl Rove are masters when it comes to playing people, but you do have to be a pretty craven fool yourself to be taken in. Since election day, we've heard the rumbling of moderation and acquiescence to Bush from the Human Rights Campaign—though they have staunchly denied it—when the nation's largest gay lobby was reported in the New York Times as being more willing to bend to red state America and might even accept Bush's draconian privatization plan for social security. Now we have the leader of the nation's largest AIDS lobby helping to toast the new president and asking others to join her in plunking down money—$125 to $5000—to benefit a group that will help Bush's friends in the drug industry and hurt people with AIDS around the world. We're not losing the battle because the religious right is so powerful—most Americans staunchly disagree with them—but because our own leaders are so weak.