Talk:Political views of Lyndon LaRouche/Gays & AIDS

This is a DRAFT for editing

AIDS
In 1973, LaRouche formed the Biological Holocaust Task Force to analyze the effects of International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Bank for International Settlements austerity and triage policies in Africa. The task force published a report in 1974, warning that these policies would cause a collapse of nutrition and sanitation, and could create an environment where pandemics of old or new diseases could begin. The report compared the situation to the collapse of public health conditions which lead to the Black Plague which killed 1/3 to 2/3 of the population of 14th Century Europe. When AIDS was first recognized as a medical phenomenon in the early 1980s, LaRouche activists were convinced that this was the pandemic about which the task force had warned. LaRouche and his followers stated that HIV, the AIDS virus, could be transmitted by casual contact, citing as supporting evidence the high incidence of the disease in Africa, the Caribbean and southern Florida. LaRouche said that the transmission by insect bite was "thoroughly established". John Grauerholz, medical director of the BHTF, told reporters that the the Soviet Union may have started the epidemic and that U.S. health officials aided the Soviets by not doing more to stop AIDS.

AIDS became a key plank in LaRouche's platform. His slogan was "Spread Panic, not AIDS!" LaRouche's followers created "Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee" (PANIC), which sponsored California Proposition 64, the "LaRouche Initiative", in 1986. 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 anti-gay measure that would force HIV-positive individuals out of their jobs and into quarantine, or create "concentration camps for AIDS patients." Mel Klenetsky, co-director of political operations for the Larouche-affiliated National Democratic Policy Committee and LaRouche's campaign director, said that there must be universal testing and mandatory quarantining of HIV carriers. "Twenty to 30 million out of 100 million people in central Africa have AIDS," Klenetsky said. "It is spreading because of impoverished economic conditions, and that is a direct result of IMF policies that have destroyed people's means of resisting the disease." Klenetsky said that LaRouche believes that not only drug users and homosexuals are vulnerable to the disease. According to newspaper reports, the LaRouche newspaper New Solidarity said the initiative was opposed by Communist gangs composed of the "lower sexual classes" and he warned of the recruitment of millions of Americans into the ranks of "AIDS-riddled homosexuality". The measure was met with strong opposition and was defeated. A second AIDS initiative qualified for the ballot in 1988, but the measure failed by a larger margin. In response to a survey which predicted that 72% of voters would oppose the measure, a spokesman called the poll is "an obvious fraud", saying that pollsters deliberately worded questions to prejudice respondents against the initiative. He additionally said that the poll was part of a "big lie...witch hunt" orchestrated by Armand Hammer and Elizabeth Taylor.

During the 1986 campaign LaRouche speculated that if governments did not take "credible measures," lynch mobs of violence-prone teenagers might begin to attack suspected AIDS carriers, beginning in Britain and then spreading to other countries, and that such lynch mobs "might be seen by future generations' historians as the only political force which acted to save the human species from extinction". In an interview with a radio show in California, LaRouche said that, "A person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around shooting up a neighborhood" and blamed the Soviet Union for creating the "AIDS conspiracy". LaRouche wrote that politicians were not acting because "[t]hey did not want...to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby...I don't know why they're "gay," they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw!" In My Program Against AIDS he wrote that, "AIDS demonstrates afresh...that if society promotes the violation of the principles' of our bodies' design, that society shall suffer in some way or another for this obscenity."

The LaRouche movement targeted schools where children with AIDS were attending. As early as 1985 NDPC members ran for local school boards on a platform of keeping infected students out of school. In 1986 LaRouche supporters travelled from Seattle, Washington to Lebanon, Oregon to urge the school board there to reverse a policy that would allow children with AIDS to enroll. In 1987 followers tried to organize a boycott of an elementary school in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, sending a van with loudspeakers through the district. They disrupted an informational meeting and according to press accounts told parents, "The blood of your own children will be on your hands if you allow this child with AIDS in your school," or shouted at opponents, "He has AIDS! He has AIDS!"

LaRouche purchased a national TV spot during his 1988 presidential campaign, in which he summarized his views on the AIDS epidemic. The Associated Press reported that he said most statements about how AIDS is spread were an "outright lie" and that safe sex was just propaganda put out by the government to avoid spending the money required to address the crisis. According to his 1992 campaign book, the three main points he presented were: an $8 billion a year "crash program" to find a cure; use of public health measures including universal screening; and a hospital-building program to handle the expected increase in patients due to AIDS.

LaRouche-affiliated candidates used AIDS as an issue as late as 1994. In a 1999 webcast to followers, LaRouche said about AIDS medications: "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." The LaRouche organization continues to blame the IMF for the spread of AIDS.