In remembrance: Rush Limbaugh celebrated the deaths of gay men from AIDS on his radio show [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

Far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh made it his life’s work since the 1980’s to make American conservatives more reactionary and hateful. A cigar smoker who denied it was harmful, he died today at age 70 of lung cancer.

One of the ways he made the world a worse place to live was a regular segment on his radio show called the “AIDS Update” where he would celebrate the AIDS-related deaths of gay and bi men. The segment was apparently so awful that even Limbaugh himself later stopped it and said it was “very insensitive to people who were dying.”

In the 1980s, gay and bi men were dying at an alarming rate from the virus at a time when even mentioning LGBTQ people was still very taboo. Then-President Ronald Reagan didn’t talk about the epidemic for years as it ravaged the community while government agencies dragged their feet in responding to it and religious leaders celebrated it as divine punishment for homosexuality.

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This upset Limbaugh, according to Ze’ev Chafets, who wrote in his book Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One: “He chastised ‘militant homosexuals’ for their disrespectful behavior and shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless ‘AIDS Update’ segments introduced by Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.'”

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"If I must saying good about the dead; he's dead. Good!"