Pat Norman

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half of the proposed increase in military spending for fiscal year 1986 could lift every U.S. kid out of poverty next year.

Too many of our own people are underfed and undernourished here in the United States. The continent of Africa is experiencing famine. South America and Southeast Asia are ravished with starvation. Global unemployment stands at somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent.

The free market, private enterprise system can't deliver the food where it's needed. Right-wingers won't give food away. They can deliver millions of small arms, bullets, mines, missiles, propaganda leaflets, and police riot equipment to the tiniest nations in the world and to the tinniest of the tin-horn dictators, but they they can't deliver food or civilian goods and jobs.

I think it's time we put this whole crazy right-wing military crapshoot into some kind of a perspective. Now the world is The following are excerpts from Pat Norman's opening speech to the Nov 2. conference. Norman, one of the chairper -sons of the conference, is the director of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Health Services.

We are here to coalesce in the fight against the attempts to systematically strip us of all of the rights gained over the past eight decades.

This administration has tried to end the Voting Rights Act, so that Southern Blacks must again begin to protect themselves against the threat of violence. We see cutbacks in legal aid and have seen severely limited services to all those people who need to protect themselves legally.

We protest the loss of human services. We protest the high unemployment rate that keeps falling only because more and more people are actually put off the rolls of the unemployed.

Due to the losses of health care, our seniors get reduced medical benefits. The infant mortality rate has risen, particularly among Blacks and ethnic minority children. It has reached an all-time high in this land of plenty. We also see decreases in education funds as a direct attack on poor people and minorities, who cannot afford the education.

And what we see happening to women is a direct attack against women's rights.

In fact it's really remarkable--they're trying to bury the Equal Rights Amend -ment, take away reproductive rights and sex education, family planning, even the counseling that goes along with it. And now they have struck down women's rights to equal access to jobs and even to com -parable worth.

Our coalition members are really very sensitive people, and they protest the abu - Pat Norman sive treatment of people with AIDS.

We in this coalition protest blaming the victims of this government's actions for the ills of this country.

Now, you know, we talk a whole lot about coalitions but I want you to be real clear. All of the members of the coalition do not agree on every issue. We are learning that this is the nature of the coalition and that in order for us to continue we must agree to disagree.

We also know that each of us cannot win by ourselves and we must cooperate. We must use the points of agreement to educate ourselves and to defeat our common enemies.

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The following are excerpts from Keith Johnson's presentation to the Central America panel. Johnson is the president of Keith Johnson: attack a few months before our visit.

That's not all that was destroyed, however, in that attack. One farm worker

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