William E. Dannemeyer

William Edwin Dannemeyer (September 22, 1929 – July 9, 2019) was a conservative American politician, activist, and author, known for his opposition to LGBT rights.

He entered Santa Maria Junior College in 1947 before transferring to Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana.

He graduated from "Valpo" in 1950 and earned a J.D. at Hastings College of the Law of the University of California in 1952.

From 1952 to 1954 he served in the United States Army in the Counter Intelligence Corps during the Korean War.

Dannemeyer began practicing law in Santa Barbara in 1955, serving concurrently as a Santa Barbara County deputy district attorney.

He moved to Fullerton in 1959 to become the assistant city attorney.

He was elected originally as a Democrat to the California State Assembly in 1962 and was re-elected in 1964 when he was also a member of the Electoral College, casting his vote for Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 United States presidential election.

Instead of seeking re-election to the Assembly in 1966, he made a failed bid for a seat in the California State Senate.

He then became a judge pro tempore of the municipal and superior courts from 1966–1976.

In 1968, he appeared on a television show hosted by fellow future Congressman Bob Dornan to announce that he was leaving the Democratic Party to become a Republican.

He would win election to the Assembly for a final term in 1976 as a Republican.

He did succeed in pushing hospitals to notify post-1977 recipients of blood transfusions that they were at risk.

In November 1978, Dannemeyer was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives, and returned for six additional terms.

He accumulated a strongly conservative record on the Budget, Judiciary, and Energy and Commerce Committees, supporting legislation to suppress illegal immigration, restrict telephone sex lines, and criminalize flag desecration.

He served as U.S. Representative from the 39th Congressional District of California from 1979 to 1993, during which time he, along with friend and fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan, came to personify Orange County conservatism.

Dannemeyer was opposed to gay rights, and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories.

After leaving office, Dannemeyer expressed extreme antisemitic views, including a claim that Jews were guilty of a plot to legalize the murder of American Christians, as part of a larger conspiracy to establish a New World Order.

Dannemeyer was born in Long Beach, California, to German immigrants, Charlotte Ernestine (Knapp) and Henry William Dannemeyer.

He attended Trinity Lutheran School in Los Angeles and Long Beach Poly High School.

An Eagle Scout, Dannemeyer received the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America.

He gained national notoriety with his proposals to stop the emerging AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, such as banning HIV-positive immigrants.

He attempted to block federal funding of evolution-related exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in 1982, and pushed for easing the separation of church and state.

On fiscal issues, he advocated budget cuts for social programs, renegotiation of the national debt, tax reduction, and deregulation.

He was the lead Republican sponsor of the 1985 deregulation of natural gas prices.

In 1985, Dannemeyer advocated barring persons with AIDS from working in the healthcare industry, stating that there was already "a requirement that nurses who are AIDS victims not work in maternity [wards] because a person with AIDS emits a spore that has been known to cause birth defects."

He was the only prominent politician to support the LaRouche movement's Proposition 64 in 1986.

Another California ballot initiative he backed, Proposition 102, would have mandated widespread testing, tracing of sexual partners by state authorities, and a mandatory quarantine of persons with AIDS.

It failed by a considerable margin.

In 1989, he was one of the successful House managers in the impeachment trial of then-Judge Walter Nixon for committing perjury in front of a grand jury.

Dannemeyer was an outspoken critic of LGBT rights, and on June 29, 1989, read a graphic description of gay sex into the Congressional Record titled "What Homosexuals Do".

In this statement, Dannemeyer said:

"... activities peculiar to homosexuality include: Rimming, or one man using his tongue to lick the rectum of another man; golden showers, having one man or men urinate on another man or men; fisting or handballing, which has one man insert his hand and/or part of his arm into another man's rectum; and using what are euphemistically termed 'toys' such as one man inserting dildoes, certain vegetables, or lightbulbs up another man's rectum."

In 1989 he published Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America, attacking the gay rights movement.

In 1990 he was one of twenty representatives to vote against the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In 1992, Dannemeyer did not run for reelection to the United States House of Representatives.

Instead, he ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator, but lost to fellow Orange County Republican John F. Seymour.

That stated, by 1994, he was open to the AIDS dissent movement and the views of UC Berkeley Professor Peter Duesberg and called for a full-scale Congressional investigation into the HIV = AIDS hypothesis.

In 1994, Dannemeyer ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator, but lost to Michael Huffington.

After leaving public office, he remained a harsh critic of the Clinton administration.

During his 1994 campaign for the Senate, Dannemeyer was an early proponent of the Clinton body count conspiracy theory, and sent an alleged list of victims to congressional leadership.