Former president Reagan's claiming he wanted freedom for everyone was kind of like the social services worker who gives aid to countless clients, then goes home and beats his children. When Reagan said he wanted people to live in freedom, he didn't necessarily mean American people.

When he was in Hollywood, he covered his back by naming a few names to the McCarthy Commission. Not exactly courageous (another attribute somehow identified with the former president). But that wasn't all. In secret, he named enough names to put McCarthy into ecstasy. In secret, like the "courageous" straight-shooter guy he was.

When Reagan was governor of California, he went to great lengths to destroy free speech on university campuses, calling on university officials to throw protestors out of the school, claiming "they don't deserve the education they are getting." Apparently, Reagan wasn't big on education about the First Amendment. He also colluded with the FBI to destroy the career of UC president Clark Kerr.

Reagan was certainly no fan of the freedom to worship as one chooses; one of his pet projects was his attempt to return prayer to the classroom. He used the same ridiculous argument that is used by today's Christian Right: that no child would be "forced" to pray if s/he didn't want to. The problem with that argument, of course, is that when you're a child or adolescent, the biggest social suicide you can commit is to refuse to conform. The stakes become even higher when you are refusing to conform to the so-called moral requirements of existing authority.

You could say that Reagan didn't want gay men to live in freedom. In fact, you could say he didn't much care if they lived at all. During the worst American public health crisis of modern times, Reagan was totally silent, offering no leadership, while 60,000 Americans--most of them gay men--died of AIDS. This was after they had suffered painful symptoms and were socially and medically ostracized.

Where I come, the type of person Reagan was is called a hypocrite. Same goes for those who worshiped him.