William E. Dannemeyer Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
William Edwin Dannemeyer (b. 1929), commonly Bill Dannemeyer, is a right-wing politician, activist, and author. He is currently honorary national chairman of Citizens for a Better America. He served as U.S. Representative from the 39th Congressional District of California from 1979 to 1993, during which time he and friend and fellow Republican Congressman Robert Dornan came to personify Orange County conservatism.Dannemeyer was born in Long Beach, California on September 22, 1929. He attended Trinity Lutheran School in Los Angeles and Long Beach Poly High School, entering Santa Maria Junior College in 1947 before transferring to Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. He graduated from "Valpo" in 1950 and earned a J.D at Hastings College of the Law of the University of California, Davis in 1952. From 1952 to 1954 he served in the United States Army in the Counter Intelligence Corps during the Korean War.
He began practicing law in Santa Barbara in 1955, serving concurrently as a deputy district attorney. He moved to Fullerton, California in 1959 to become the assistant city attorney. He was elected as a Republican to the California State Assembly in 1962 and was reelected in 1964; was a municipal and superior court judge pro tempore 1966–1976; and was returned to the Assembly for a final term in 1976.
In November 1978 he was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives, and returned for six additional terms. He accumulated a strongly conservative record on the Budget, Judiciary, and Energy and Commerce Committees, supporting legislation to suppress illegal immigration, restrict telephone sex lines, and illegalize flag desecration.
He attempted to block federal funding of evolution-related exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution in 1982 and pushed for loosening the separation of church and state and reinforcing traditional moral norms.
On fiscal issues, he advocated budget cuts in social programs, renegotiation of the national debt, tax reduction, and deregulation. He was the lead Republican sponsor of the 1985 deregulation of natural gas prices.
Dannemeyer was an outspoken critic of homosexuality and infamously read a graphic description of gay sex into the Congressional Record in 1978. He gained national notoriety with his proposals to staunch the emerging AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, such as banning HIV-positive immigrants. A California ballot initiative he backed which would have mandated widespread testing and mandatory quarantines of persons with AIDS failed by a considerable margin. He did succeed in pushing hospitals to notify post-1977 recipients of blood transfusions that they were at risk. In 1989 he published Shadow in the Land: Homosexuality in America, attacking the gay rights movement.
In 1994 he ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator, but lost to Michael Huffington.
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