"While the outbreak of the mysterious and deadly disease in the early 1980s spurred many religiously motivated caregivers to new heights of compassion, Falwell used it to craft new fundraising appeals. In AIDS, religious conservatives like Falwell found the punitive manifestation for homosexual behavior for which they had been searching. No longer, they reasoned, could homosexuals pretend that homosexuality was without consequences. AIDS and homosexuality would become virtually synonymous in the rhetoric of the religious right and in the nation's consciousness. Ignoring the inconvenient facts that many people with AIDS are not gay, that the vast majority of gay men would never contract HIV, and that lesbians are at extremely low risk, Falwell and his colleagues on the right played AIDS as divine retribution for sodomy. In a 1987 fund-raising letter, for instance, Falwell accused gay men of donating blood because "they know they are going to die--and they are going to take as many people with them as they can.""
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Non-fiction authors from the United StatesChristian leadersBaptists from the United StatesPeople from VirginiaClergy from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
John Gallagher and Chris Bull, The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s (1996), Ch. 1
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell
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Jerry Falwell
Jerry Lamon Falwell (11 August 1933 – 15 May 2007) was an American pastor, Southern Baptist, televangelist, founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University, and a prominent conservative activist.
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