William Dannemeyer, a seven-time period California congressman who exemplified the archconservative politics of Orange County, calling for a balanced federal price range even as making country-wide headlines for his assaults on “militant homosexuality” in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, died July 9 at his wife’s home in Thousand Palms, California. He was 89.
He had dementia, said his son, Bruce Dannemeyer.
Dannemeyer was “a symbol of the all-white, immediately, Christian Orange County,” which has become a nationally recognized bastion of conservatism inside the overdue Nineteen Sixties, said Fred Smoller, a political technology professor at Chapman University in Orange, California.
An attorney and former conservative Democrat, Dannemeyer served in the U.S. House as a Republican from 1979 to 1993, representing Fullerton and different southeastern suburbs of Los Angeles while the place became ruled by way of defense contractors and former Midwesterners.
A Lutheran elder who stated he noticed the little separation between church and country, Dannemeyer became frequently mentioned as one of the most conservative individuals of Congress and routinely took to the House grounds to criticize the “homosexual movement,” abortion rights activists, racy television programs and “environmental zealots.”He preferred regulatory rollbacks, expansive offshore oil drilling, cuts to social applications, and a return to the gold trend.
Faced controversy by selling fake claims about a picture description of “the common gay’s favored sports” in the congrinonal report and likening Nelson Mandela to black militant H. Rap Brown and felon Willie Horton.
In 1990, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed Dannemeyer “the Renaissance guy of bigotry.” The Advocate, an LGBTQ magazine, later covered him in its listing of “the 50 biggest homophobes of the ultimate 50 years.”
Dannemeyer regularly broke with his GOP colleagues, which included voting against the Americans With Disabilities Act and opposing the law monitoring hate crimes because it located homosexuality on par with race, religion, and ethnicity as included classes.
His fireplace-and-brimstone rhetoric on gays made him a hero to the nation’s secular right and the main villain to LGBTQ rights advocates, with whom he thrilled in publicly debating, frequently maintaining, “God’s plan for man in this world is Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”In a 1989 e-book, “Shadow Inside the Land,” he warned: “We must both defeat militant homosexuality, or it’ll defeat us.”
Dannemeyer received large assistance from his district, effortlessly prevailing reelection each year; however, he proved too radical to win statewide office. In 1992, he competed for a Senate seat after the incumbent, Pete Wilson, a Republican, changed into the elected governor of California. He lost the number one to John Seymour (who fell in flip to Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat) and unsuccessfully ran again in 1994.
The best son of German immigrants, William Edwin Dannemeyer, was born in Long Beach, California, on Sept. 22, 1929. His father, who changed into a person with epilepsy, ran a feed shop in Los Angeles before shifting to a sanitarium in Nebraska. At the same time, William was young, leaving his mom to care for him and an older sister by scrubbing floors.
“The closest aspect he needed to a mentor — or a father, for that rely on — became his scoutmaster,” said Bruce Dannemeyer. “Boy Scouts stuffed a big void in his life.”
