Back in the late 1980s, as HIV spread throughout the United States and the LGBTQ community mobiliized to raise awareness about how the disease was spread and how to avoid being infected, Republican members of Congress became obsessed with homosexuality and forced their extremist views on their colleagues in an effort to shut down HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns that they deemed to be “immoral” and “subversive.”
There was William E. Dannmeyer, a six-term Republican Congressman from Orange County, California, who in June of 1989 insisted on reading into the Congressional Record his statement titled "What Homosexuals Do."
And there was Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-NH), who attacked then-President Ronald Reagan for appointing an openly gay man to a 1987 White House panel on AIDS, saying, "Homosexuality, that is the practice of homosexuality, is immoral. And the consequences to our society from that immoral practice is AIDS."
But perhaps the worst — and most destructive — was Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), a religious extremist who refused to pass the 1988 federal appropriations bill unless it included his amendment that forbid funding for any HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns that could be considered a “promotion of homosexuality.”
During floor debate, Sen. Helms displayed sex-positive comic books created by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and angrily declared that federal money helped to pay for GMHC's education program (which likely saved tens of thousands of lives). Helms’ plan to hold the multi-billion-dollar appropriations bill hostage worked. In a 94-2 vote, the U.S. Senate adopted the Helms Amendment.
Flash forward to 2024, where we now have bans on the government funding of library and school books with racial themes or LGBTQ characters, the criminalization of drag shows, and Rep. Josh Hawley’s ‘‘Ending DHS Funding for Liberal Propaganda Act,’’ a bill that if passed by Congress would issue restrictions on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in its grants to organizations seeking to raise awareness about many issues that affect the public.
Hawley claims he introduced this bill after he learned that the University of Rhode Island received a $700,000 DHS grant for its Media Education Lab to promote media literacy, including the development of resources for media literacy instruction in high school curriculum. According to its website, the mission of URI’s lab is to “provide opportunities for students to develop the four C’s: communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration.”
This all sounds like “liberal propaganda” to Sen. Hawley, a deeply religious and socially conservative U.S. senator who echoed former President Donald Trump’s lie about widespread election fraud and a stolen election.
"Now DHS is paying ... leftist academics to create ‘counter-propaganda’ on ‘immigration, racial justice’ and COVID," Hawley said on social media last week.
Hawley seems worried that teaching the “four C’s” to American teenagers might help them to cut through the conservative propaganda that he’s personally and professionally bought into — vaccines! immigrants! Black people! election fraud! — and instead see a clearer picture about what’s going on in this country. Heaven forfend!
Yes, to Sen. Hawley, these media literacy programs are downright offensive and should be illegal — or at least de-funded. And this took me back to the AIDS crisis during the horrible Reagan years, when religious extremists were invited by elected officials to mold the government response to the deadliest disease ever to hit the U.S. — to the detriment of many.
Homophobes in elected office like Jesse Helms, William E. Dannmeyer, and others were allowed to wreak damage upon the programs of organizations and local public programs trying to educate the public about HIV/AIDS, treat and care for HIV-positive people, and prevent the spread of the virus. The Helms Amendment alone had a chilling effect on the CDC’s ability to stop the spread of AIDS among IV-drug users, gay men, and sexually active straight people, particularly young people. The repercussions were felt in every corner of the country, with hundreds of thousands of people dying each year from a virus without a cure.
This time, however, the virus is conservative propaganda. While not as deadly as HIV was in the 1980s and 1990s, misinformation and fabrications in the media are designed to create chaos and lead people — particularly young people — down a path that isolates them from the facts. And Senator Hawley and other socially conservative extremists like him would prefer that their twisted dogma go unchecked.
Let’s learn from history, so we don’t repeat it.