U.S. History - Reagan/Milk Ronald

U.S. History - Reagan/Milk

RONALD REAGAN and HARVEY MILK

The Life and Accomplishments of Ronald Reagan in Contemporary Context:

In his early career, Ronald Reagan opposed several important pieces of civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and as Governor of California, he opposed various fair housing legislative campaigns. However, Reagan subsequently supported later important versions or extensions of those civil rights acts and fair housing laws. In 1988, as President, he vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act and also opposed the proposal of Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. Reagan also negotiated with South Africa despite its Apartheid policies (Reeves, 2005).

Reagan always claimed not to have opposed civil rights or racial equality and justified his seemingly racist opposition to a long series of civil rights legislation on the basis of his concern with state autonomy and his opposition to increasing the relative authority of the federal government. In retrospect, his claims may have been true, even if his political priorities are difficult to understand, because during his youth in Illinois, local businesses refused to serve blacks; Reagan never supported those attitudes and actually used to invite blacks denied service at the town inn to eat and sleep at his mother's home (Reeves, 2005). By far, Ronald Reagan's most significant accomplishment was his role in helping to bring about the collapse of the former Soviet Union at the end of his second term in office. Reagan had precipitated the events leading up the fall of Marxism beginning with his reversal of detente in the immediate wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan before he took office and the massive arms race that it triggered. That long-term expense drained the Soviet Union of its resources as did Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposal to militarize space to render intercontinental ballistic missiles obsolete.

By that time, Reagan had already been publicly predicting the collapse of Marxism, repeatedly referring to it as a political system destined for the ash heap of history (Reeves, 2005). Challenges and Changes to Western Political History Inspired by Ronald Reagan:

Reagan faced serious challenges during his presidential administration, including the Air Traffic Controller Strike of 1981, to which he responded by invoking the Taft-

Hartley Act of 1947, essentially busting the air traffic controllers union. Reagan also faced serious opposition to his economic policies which were labeled "trickle down economics" and "Reaganomics" because critics believed the tax cuts and other economic policies he supported helped the wealthy much more than the poor. In a manner not dissimilar to events occurring during the administration of George W. Bush, the Reagan administration supported various economic policies and deregulation of the financial investment industries that were subsequently implicated in the stock market crash of 1987. From his earliest political campaigns, Reagan emphasized the states' rights approach to government and also argued against federal responsibility for various programs intended to benefit the poor, including Medicaid, food stamps, and various federal education programs. Reagan also supported the Pro-Life position and opposed the therapeutic or research use of human stem cells although former First Lady Nancy Reagan publicly reversed her position on the issue after the former president was afflicted with Alzheimer's for the last decade of his life.

The Life and Accomplishments of Harvey Milk in Contemporary Context:

Harvey Milk's most important contribution was as the individual who represented the participation of gays and lesbians into the American political process. In many respects, Milk's broad political objectives emphasizing the responsibility of government to solve the problems of its citizens may have been more effective in furthering gay rights than the more militant or at least confrontational approach taken by many of his contemporaries as well as those of others since his assassination (Marcus, 2002).

Specifically, Milk acknowledged but never directly promoted his own homosexuality and in his responsibilities in local government, Milk responded to citizens' complaints about matters such as roads that needed potholes repaired and the need for local ordinances pertaining to the mandatory cleanup of dog droppings. More importantly, in a town with many gay residents who were not parents, Milk opposed the closing of an elementary school under the proposition that the community must be equally welcoming of everybody and not reflect the needs of any groups over those of others, regardless of their respective prominence (Marcus, 2002).

In general, such concerns exemplified Milk's overall belief that the road to achieving tolerance for gays and other minorities lay in valuing the underlying principles of equality rather than in supporting causes specific to particular groups, even his own.

In that regard, Milk can also be credited with helping to establish a more community- centric attitude conducive to the rights of all individuals that achieved the objective of increasing the acceptance of homosexuality in a manner that avoided polarizing his constituents on either side of the issue (Marcus, 2002). Challenges and Changes to Western Political History Inspired by Harvey Milk:

Harvey Milk obviously faced a tremendous challenge represented by his homosexuality at a time when tolerance and acceptance of alternative lifestyles was not encouraging to acknowledging ones sexuality publicly. For that reason, Milk himself had never revealed his homosexuality to his mother before her death (Marcus, 2002) notwithstanding his continual campaign to promote gay acceptance in society.

Milk' assassination contributed to changes in California law with respect to the statutory definitions of "diminished capacity" as a defense to charges of murder after his murderer, Dan White received an extremely light sentence making him eligible for parole after only five years, partly by virtue of the so-called "Twinkie" defense advanced by his defense counsel who argued that junk food had contributed to White's diminished mental capacity at the time of the assassination (Marcus, 2005).