NEVADA: Teabagger Senate Candidate Sharron Angle Linked To Anti-Gay Group

Talking Points Memo has uncovered an anti-gay newspaper insert published in 1994 by the wingnut party that GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle belonged to at the time.

The far-right third party that Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle called home in the 1990s supported abolishing "the debt money system" and ran a vitriolic anti-gay insert in state newspapers that portrays LGBT people -- or, as Angle's party called them, "sodomites" -- as child-molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks, according to documents obtained by TPM. As we reported earlier this month, Angle was a member of Nevada's Independent American Party, a Christian conservative-cum-libertarian third party, for at least six years while she was getting her feet wet in politics in the 1990s. Independent American Party members told us that Angle switched to be a Republican in 1997 out of political expediency as she was preparing to make a run for state-level office.[snip]

In 1994, the party attracted considerable controversy by placing a 16-page advertising insert in Nevada newspapers promoting an amendment to the state constitution that would explicitly permit discrimination against LGBT people by businesses and government. Janine Hansen, the current executive director of the party and the editor of the '94 insert, told TPM earlier this month that "in general [Angle] agreed with our position on the issues." The ad insert, which approvingly cites an 1814 legal treatise titled "Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation," is a digest of articles that refer to LGBT people alternately as "homosexuals," "sodomites," and "brazen perverts." The insert includes virtually every homophobic myth ever conceived. Sample headlines include: "Homosexual Curriculum In The First Grade" ... "Flawed Science Nurtures Genetic Origin For Homosexuality" ... "No Constitutional Right To Be A Sodomite."

The insert cited lies from discredited anti-gay "researcher" Dr. Paul Cameron and made the claim that HIV can survive in water.