Talk:Political views of Lyndon LaRouche/Gays & AIDS

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[edit] LaRouche on Gays and AIDS

In the 1970s and 1980s, LaRouche and his supporters frequently wrote articles containing animosity toward gay people. In 1986, an editorial in the LaRouche publication Illinois Tribunal wrote that "... as a category, gays and lesbians do not represent a valid voting consituency, and neither do prostitutes, drug pushers, child molesters, warlocks, witches, pornographers, or others who are morally equivalent." ("End Harold Washington's Consistently Disgusting Career," Illinois Tribunal, July 7, 1986, editorial page).

LaRouche has often written that governments must actively "isolate" AIDS patients from the general population. If they do not, the liklihood is, he writes, that lynch mobs of teenagers will form to to save the human species from extinction:

Short of medical means, not in sight until a time too late to save many nations, the only solution is either public health measures including isolation as necessary, or accelerated deaths of carriers. ("Teenage Gangs' Lynching of Gays is Foreseen Soon" - Lyndon LaRouche, (1986))[1].

LaRouche activists formed the "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC) in 1986, and in 1988 the "Prevent AIDS Now In California" (also PANIC) committee, each of which placed initiatives on the state ballot. While proponents argued that the measures would merely return AIDS to the list of communicable diseases under the public health laws, opponents characterized it as an effort to force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine.

"Health professionals believe that Proposition 64 would seriously hurt their ability to treat and find a cure for AIDS. Current medical efforts based on years of research will be undermined by the fear generated by this irrational proposition." -Helen Miramontes, R. N.. President California Nurses Association

LaRouche defended the efforts in a 1986 speech:

We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word. Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay," they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw! The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users . . ." ("The End of the Age of Aquarius?". Executive Intelligence Review, January 10, 1986)[2].

Both messages were defeated at the polls and LaRouche subsequently appeared to modify his views. In a meeting webcast on December 11, 1999, he said:

Look, take the case of AIDS, which I've been attacked for by all kinds of crazy people. I proposed that we mobilize $40 billion from the Federal government — that's back in the middle of the 1980s — to combat a danger, an epidemic disease of a new type, which implicitly threatens all mankind, which has — it's also in the United States, and it's in Africa: In Africa, because of environmental conditions and other tropical-disease conditions, the rate of spread of AIDS is now that most of the population of black Africa is threatened by virtual extinction — not total extinction, but near-extinction . . .

Who cares about whether the guy's a homosexual? It's irrelevant! It's a human being who is suffering from a disease, who needs help and protection . . . Who wants to make a category of "homosexuals"? I don't believe in it; it's not a legitimate category. It's just people, people who are suffering and dying. [3]