In Wake Of His Death, Media Smears Rush Limbaugh For ‘AIDS Update’ He Repeatedly Apologized For

It seems that rather than attempt to hold Rush Limbaugh eternally accountable for his sins, this one in particular, what should matter most is the context and his apology.

One of the remarkable truths about those who hold a visceral hatred of Rush Limbaugh is the high likelihood they have never listened to his show or read any of his books. They just know they strongly dislike Limbaugh for a good reason, one they can usually validate with a quick search of what others have said about him along with a quote or two for evidence.

The most tangible demonstration of this phenomenon is the newly discovered controversy over a brief segment Rush performed in 1990 called the “AIDS Update.” Prior to his passing, this segment only appeared in a few brief references, cited in a few books and contemporary articles. Outside of that, it seems to have been forgotten until rediscovered upon learning of Limbaugh’s passing with the intention of publicizing every incendiary thing he ever said or was accused of saying.

The segment was included in The New York Times’ obituary of Limbaugh and quickly spread on Twitter, with thousands of influential accounts tweeting that Rush once made fun of AIDS patients on his radio show in the 1980s and ’90s. Paul Elliott Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in communication and rhetoric, represented the most common claim in a viral tweet in which he claimed, “Rush Limbaugh had a regular radio segment where he would read off the names of gay people who died of AIDS and celebrate it and play horns and bells and stuff.”

According to Newsweek, the word “AIDS” alongside Limbaugh’s name was the third-most searched term on Google. Even those active in the LGBT movement at the time, like Andrew Sullivan, stated they had never heard of this before.

It did happen, just not in the way it has very quickly been popularized on social media. There are no recordings of the segment reported yet. We do know of some details, however, such as The New York Times obituary that states, “Mr. Limbaugh ran a regular segment called ‘AIDS updates,’ in which he mocked the deaths of gay men by playing Dionne Warwick’s recording of the song ‘I’ll Never Love This Way Again.’”

The Iowa Cedar Gazette reported in March 1990 a similar description, as did James Retter in his 1998 book “The Anatomy of a Scandal” and Ze’ev Chafets in his 2010 book, “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One.” None of the sources indicate Limbaugh read the names of gay men who had died of AIDS on air.

Limbaugh told the Gazette, “The AIDS update is, as is everything I do, politically oriented and based upon my reaction to what I consider to be extremism in the political mainstream by a group of people.” He went on to specific that he was not targeting AIDS victims but the militant gay rights movement of the time that “blame[s] church and government officials for the epidemic.”

He said, “It’s a behaviorally spread disease and they attempt to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the actions they’ve taken (then) suggest people who disagree with them get banned from television,” He continued, “So The AIDS update is meant to offend them. D-mn right.”

Most relevant here, however, is Limbaugh’s response in December 1990 as The New York Times reported Limbaugh “feeling a greater responsibility as his audience grows. He killed a running bit on AIDS after two weeks. ‘It’s the single most regretful thing I’ve ever done,’ he says, “because it ended up making fun of people who were dying long, painful and excruciating deaths, when they were not the target. It was a totally irresponsible thing to do.”

In Chafet’s book, Limbaugh is quoted as saying, “I engaged in an AIDS Update that missed the mark totally and ended up being very insensitive to people who were dying.”

While each source notes Limbaugh’s apology, which was not due to any reported backlash or threats from sponsors but from his own initiative, they intentionally put the segment in their headlines. The story ironically is not that the firebrand who enjoyed intentionally stirring up political controversy to confront leftwing political correctness did something abhorrent, but that he realized he went too far and was harming people who didn’t deserve it, apologized, and then ended the segment on his own.

Unfortunately, this fact is either glossed over or dismissed by the vast majority of people eager to demonize him as a person. GLAAD, for example, insisted, “Rush Limbaugh spent much of his career maliciously attacking LGBTQ people, including mocking those impacted by the AIDS crisis. News outlets reporting on his death should include this hateful history.” This sudden demand to remind everyone of his sins is most striking considering they forgot it themselves, if they ever knew it happened in the first place.

Leftwing activists often lecture us on the importance of personal growth and redemption, yet they stubbornly feel entitled to withhold forgiveness when it politically suits them. The 2001 “Missouri Biographical Dictionary,” one of the sources of the controversy, reported that Limbaugh donated $10,000 to the Pediatric AIDS Foundation after ending the segment. This act of charity was dismissed by LGBTQ Nation as a “slight” to gay and bi men who were dying of AIDS because the donation went to helping children with the disease.

As a person living with HIV and having lived with it for more than a decade, I know how cruel people can be about this disease and I am well aware of how many on the right responded to it in the 1980s and early ’90s. But I also know genuine regret and compassion when I see it and that was demonstrated by Limbaugh. Whatever motivated Limbaugh’s most controversial statements over the decades, the people who knew him best knew him as kind, funny, generous, and genuine, which shines through this particular controversy.

It seems that rather than attempt to hold him eternally accountable for his sins, this one in particular, what should matter most is the context and the consequence. Limbaugh engaged in his typical blunt and bombastic style to comment on how the gay movement chose to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its early years. Once he realized he was unfairly harming innocent people he never meant to insult or mock, he stopped, apologized, and donated money to help end the HIV/AIDS crisis. That is what should be remembered.

“Was that the one with the theme song “Up Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon?”

Nope, that was his “Condom Update”. He also had a ‘Gay Community Update” with a very feminine sounding singer, singing “You don’t own me”.

I don’t remember his AIDS Update, but back then the Left was ignoring him, hoping he’d go away, rather than risking drawing attention to him (along with recording him, and going through every word he said, as they do now with Soros money). So he had a lot more freedom to do things on his show which would have gotten him banned in 5 minutes today.

I think Rush represented a lot of us back then regarding AIDS, since very early on, it was clear that if you wanted to avoid AIDS, you could avoid AIDS without having to ‘social distance’ or ‘wear a mask’. It was VERY EASY to avoid, and everyone knew it, yet the media kept repeating, without evidence, that AIDS was about to break out into the straight community - to get us in fear, so THEY could get huge amounts of funding, far more than cancer, for example.

NOW was a lesbian organization. Something they tried to mask.

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3200158/posts
Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives
Frontpagemag.com ^ | 9-2-2014 | Mallory Millett

...And so began my period as an unwitting witness to history. I stayed with Kate and her lovable Japanese husband, Fumio, in a dilapidated loft on The Bowery as she finished her first book, a PhD thesis for Columbia University, “Sexual Politics.”

It was 1969. Kate invited me to join her for a gathering at the home of her friend, Lila Karp. They called the assemblage a “consciousness-raising-group,” a typical communist exercise, something practiced in Maoist China. We gathered at a large table as the chairperson opened the meeting with a back-and-forth recitation, like a Litany, a type of prayer done in Catholic Church. But now it was Marxism, the Church of the Left, mimicking religious practice:

“Why are we here today?” she asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”
Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

They proceeded with a long discussion on how to advance these goals by establishing The National Organization of Women. It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society. The upshot was that the only way to do this was “to invade every American institution. Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution’”: The media, the educational system, universities, high schools, K-12, school boards, etc.; then, the judiciary, the legislatures, the executive branches and even the library system.

It fell on my ears as a ludicrous scheme, as if they were a band of highly imaginative children planning a Brinks robbery; a lark trumped up on a snowy night amongst a group of spoiled brats over booze and hashish.

To me, this sounded silly. I was enduring culture shock after having been cut-off from my homeland, living in Third-World countries for years with not one trip back to the United States. I was one of those people who, upon returning to American soil, fell out of the plane blubbering with ecstasy at being home in the USA. I knelt on the ground covering it with kisses. I had learned just exactly how delicious was the land of my birth and didn’t care what anyone thought because they just hadn’t seen what I had or been where I had been. I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know? Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit. I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing? Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?

I dismissed it as academic-lounge air-castle-building. I continued with my new life in New York while my sister became famous publishing her books, featured on the cover of “Time Magazine.” “Time” called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.” This was because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women. Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat. The only hope for women’s “liberation” (communism’s favorite word for leading minions into inextricable slavery; “liberation,” and much like “collective” – please run from it, run for your life) was this new “Women’s Movement.” Her books captivated the academic classes and soon “Women’s Studies” courses were installed in colleges in a steady wave across the nation with Kate Millett books as required reading.

Imagine this: a girl of seventeen or eighteen at the kitchen table with Mom studying the syllabus for her first year of college and there’s a class called “Women’s Studies.” “Hmmm, this could be interesting,” says Mom. “Maybe you could get something out of this.”...

NOW was a lesbian organization. Something they tried to mask.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Millett

Millett was a leading figure in the women’s movement,[8] or second-wave feminism, of the 1960s and 1970s.[24] For example, she and Sidney Abbott, Phyllis Birkby, Alma Routsong, and Artemis March were among the members of CR One, the first lesbian-feminist consciousness-raising group, although Millett identified as bisexual by late 1970.[4][5][25]

In 1966, Millett became a committee member of National Organization for Women[14] and subsequently joined the New York Radical Women,[13] Radical lesbians, and Downtown Radical Women organizations.[16]

...While Millett was speaking about sexual liberation at Columbia University, a woman in the audience asked her, “Why don’t you say you’re a lesbian, here, openly. You’ve said you were a lesbian in the past.” Millett hesitantly responded, “Yes, I am a lesbian”.[4] A couple of weeks later, Time’s December 8, 1970 article “Women’s Lib: A Second Look” reported that Millett admitted she was bisexual, which it said would likely discredit her as a spokesperson for the feminist movement because it “reinforce[d] the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.”[4][5] In response, a press conference was organized two days later in Greenwich Village by lesbian feminists Ivy Bottini and Barbara Love. It led to a statement in which 30 lesbian and feminist leaders declared their “solidarity with the struggle of homosexuals to attain their liberation in a sexist society”.[4]...

...In her 1971 book The Prostitution Papers, Millett interprets prostitution as residing at the core of the female’s condition, exposing women’s subjection more clearly than is done with marriage contracts. According to her, degradation and power, not sex, are being bought and sold in prostitution. She argues for the decriminalization of prostitution in a process directed by the sex workers themselves...

Views on pedophilia
In an interview with Mark Blasius, Millett was sympathetic to the concept of intergenerational sex, describing age of consent laws as “very oppressive” to gay male youth in particular but repeatedly reminding the interviewer that the question cannot rest on the sexual access of older men or women to children but a rethinking of children’s rights broadly understood.[44] Millett added that “one of children’s essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably primarily with each other but with adults as well” and that “the sexual freedom of children is an important part of a sexual revolution ... if you don’t change the social condition of children you still have an inescapable inequality”.[44] In this interview, Millett criticized those who wished to abolish age of consent laws, saying the issue was not focused on children’s rights but “being approached as the right of men to have sex with kids below the age of consent” and added that “no mention is made of relationships between women and girls”.[44] Millett believes sexual access to children is only one part of a larger goal of liberating children from all forms of parental oppression.[45]

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