Btw, here’s something from the National Review from Buckley just prior to the 2003 Lawrence decision by SCOTUS:

The Texas law says that gays cannot do what non-gays can do, and the facts of the matter weigh against Texas. Even if the prosecution was brought on by agents provocateurs furtively setting out to add one more right to the Bill of Rights, it’s hard to defend what the Texans did. The only way to do it, of course, is to say that what Texas did/does is not the Supreme Court’s business. But this will prove hard, because in the Bowers case in 1986, the Court acknowledged that it was the Court’s business, and now it will need to ask again whether due process, or equal protection, is involved. Justice Scalia will say it is not, and his opinion will be interesting, as his opinions are always interesting. It would be nice if Texas simply repealed the law, and let Lambda’s clients go back to their practices undisturbed.

Buckley was in favor of legalisation of most drugs.

I never heard of Firing Line until a few years ago. I don’t suppose there’s any "Best of" DVDs out there?

Everything else is on DVD. There ought to be some of Firing Line and Rush Limbaugh.

One a similar note,
I had a subscription to NR about a year ago. I don’t recall any articles on the subject, but there were many ads for the legalisation of marijuana. Was this a position held by NR?

Andrew Sullivan appreciated the late William F. Buckley, Jr.’s civil tone on matters of homosexuality, especially as contrasted with other conservatives of his era, but laments that “Buckley never challenged what he believed was a necessar…

The better wisdom is to take their career in total and dismiss the hopefully rare instances of nuttiness… I know I’ve had to do that with RonnieR and BarryG and W and even the fast-forgotten RudyGiuliani.

It’d be a shame to have expected Buckley at first to shed his orthodox Catholic-based moral values to embrace a position that took years for most leaders to finally embrace -and even some of those haven’t gotten on board as of yet.

Two new U.S. studies of gay and bisexual men who know they are infected with HIV show that more than one-third have recently had unprotected intercourse. In many cases, these men are engaging in unprotected sex with other HIV-infected men — a practice called "serosorting," where partners with a similar, HIV-positive blood test status decide to forego condoms.However, "we also found that almost a third of the men — 31.4 percent — said that they had had unprotected anal intercourse with at least one partner of unknown serostatus, and almost a quarter had unprotected intercourse with a partner who they knew was HIV uninfected," said the lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Kenneth Mayer, medical research director at Fenway Community Health, in Boston.
Or:

HIV testing rates have remained low in the United States this decade, with only about one-fifth of people at high risk for infection getting a test in any given year, according to a study published on Monday. The study also found that many more people at high risk of HIV infection — men who have sex with men, injection drug users and others — say they plan to get tested than actually do get tested."We know that there are about 1.1 million Americans infected with HIV. And we know that about 25 percent of them don’t know that they’re infected," Brian Pence, an epidemiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
And what this adds up to is that the rate of HIV among younger gay people is skyrocketing, thus ensuring that the disease is perpetuated at least another generation.

Was that worth it, Ted?

Just like Russell Kirk, a less-reknown conservative intellectual peer of Mr Buckley’s, Buckley loved to tell stories for the sheer pleasure of the story telling. 

So I’ll share my only humorous Buckley story.  On most occasions, when Buckley was on campus to speak, he stayed overnight at my folk’s home.  On one visit, when I was 12 or 13, my Mom asked me to show Mr Buckley to his room and carry his bag up.  The adults had dinner elsewhere that night and he & my folks had arrived home kind of late.  We went upstairs and I dutifully pointed out the bathroom and the study and set his bag on the bed.  I told him it was a famous bed because Bishop Sheen, Mike Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, Alan Greenspan, Russell Kirk, Bill Simon, Elliot Richardson, Tad Szulc, Bill Fulbright, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Pat Moynihan and others had slept in the bed.

He looked at me, looked at the bed, looked back at me and said "I hope you changed the sheets".  He explained that words mattered and what I should have said was noted people had been guests in my parents home and retired in the room.

Then he asked me if my Mom had any ice cream in the icebox and would I like to join him in a bowl after the adults "retired".  I said my Dad never would never retire because he liked his job too much.  Words mattered.

We never got to share that bowl of ice cream because he fell asleep at the desk in the study reading, of all things, a copy of Sandburg’s Lincoln.  He was still there early the next morning when I was heading off to swim practice.

Like you Dan, I used to love watching him on Firing Line and reading his fictional novels with Blackford Oakes long before Jason Bourne was imagined.

What a terrific man.  What an great instrument for the conservative movement.  He was 1 in a billion -never to be matched.  Never to be repeated.  A man with a true gentle soul and a piercing intellect informed, as history will note, for the Right Reasons.

Having Ronald Reagan as President during my ages 7 – 15 is something I’ve come to realize was a rare experience that many people will probably not have… a true visionary President during formative years.

Without Buckley there would not have been Reagan.

I hope they’re giving each other a big hug right now.