On Thursday evening (7/15/04), I took the time to call into the
Michael Reagan talk show twice. The first time was immediately following his interview with John Ashcroft. They talked about the PATRIOT act and terrorism. Ashcroft said at one point that, "terrorists resort to violence because their opinions are not sellable in the marketplace of ideas." I found this thought a quite useful ideological prism with which to look at the US war on Iraq. Our opinion was not sellable on the international marketplace of ideas either. But I didn't bring that up, because he would have hung up on me, and I had bigger fish to fry.
The day before (Wednesday) he said that men get AIDS and syphilis by having sex in the "exit hole". He never once mentioned that AIDS can be passed through heterosexual intercourse. He never quite disagreed with me, but he insisted on making sure that the words "heterosexual" and "drug needles" appeared together in every concession, and I left the discussion thinking that his listeners were still misinformed.
Later, after his interview with Tommy Thompson, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I called back again. They had been discussing the crisis in the number of American orphaned children in foster care. This is a good service that Michael often provides to get this information out there. He is an orphaned child who was adopted by the Reagans, and he is right in his affirmation that it is a sad fact that 19,000 children "age-out" of the system every year, having never been adopted, and that roughly 300,000 children enter foster care every year and only 275,000 are adopted. I asked him if he thought that in order to ease this imbalance and injustice, gay couples should be allowed to adopt children (note that he had spent a great part of Wednesday's show bashing gays and supporting the constitutional ammendment).
After the caveat that, "I'm gonna get into big trouble for this," he said flat out that he would support gay adoption, but only as a last resort.
That wasn't the reason that I had called back, however. In the intro that proceeded Tommy Thompson's interview, he had played the clip of John Kerry saying, "I voted for the 87 billion, before I voted against it." I told him and his listeners that the difference between the first vote and the second vote was that the first vote was for a bill that contained a provision whereby the marginally high income earners would pay a slightly higher percentage tax rate to help defer the costs, and the second version of the bill had this stripped by the Republican senators. After a prolonged (I give him credit for hearing me out so long) and heated discussion about the concept of sacrifice in a time of war, he hung up on me and stated that he would never want me to adopt any kids. So to "win" the debate, he "accused" me of being gay (as if that invalidated my argument), and in the process surely won back the recently disturbed favor of his core audience.