As some of you know, I’ve been involved in HIV prevention on the local and national level for a few years now. Today I’m in Atlanta, GA for a UCHAPS meeting and… I’m pissed. I’ve watched as cold-hearted tea bagging idiots have systematically sought to pay for corporate tax breaks with the blood of our citizenry:

Today I got to hear how Georgia has 2,000 people waiting to get on ADAP – the program that pays for HIV medications. Florida reported that they have 3,000 people waiting. While some of these jurisdictions have been able to get some temporary private funding to help continue their HIV drug assistance programs, these stop-gap measures are very temporary. Get this straight: without their medications, each one of these lives will be lost. In Florida, their Republican governor got a new law passed through their tea-bag controlled legislator that any grant of more than 50K must be personally approved by the his highness, The Governor.  You know what happened when the Florida jurisdiction asked for Federal money to pay for HIV services? The Republican governor vetoed applying for the Federal grant money.

In Texas, the Republicans tried to take HIV medication away from 14,000 people. They literally tied to kill 14,000 people by defunding the Texas HIV medication program. Rick Perry recently organized a political stunt to kick off his presidential run called “The Response.” He did this hand-in-hand with the American Family Association, an organization that calls for the imprisonment of GLBT people who are HIV+.

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

It was a hard fight, but Texas Democrats were able to lead the government in partially funding the Texas ADAP program. This means that if we continue to allow the cancer that is the tea party to spread, people I know will die because the program that keeps them alive will run out of funding.

How long will you sit on the sidelines? The people who feel okay with murdering and/or locking up our community members are the same people who, on a daily basis, attempt to maximize the suffering within the GLBT community.

We now live in an America where we will allow mega-corporations like Bank of America to not pay one buck in taxes and bestow upon them personhood but it’s okay to kill 1000s of citizens to pay for those Bush-era tax loopholes. This madness must stop. The Tea Party is just the newest incarnation of the Christian right wing and they need to be stopped!

Register to vote and vote damn it! Get 5 people you know to register to vote and get them to vote as well. The AIDS epidemic broke the back of the queer community in the 80s and we’re looking at reliving that nightmare soon if things don’t change. Is this the America you want to create with your indifference and silence?