LGBTQ community outlives another homophobe. Judith Reisman supported blaming gays for the Holocaust

Judith Reisman is the latest homophobe which the LGBTQ community has outlived.

So many have come against the LGBTQ community attempting to take away our rights and safety. And they have all failed. They fall by the wayside and yet we are still here and still fighting. Judith Reisman is the latest.

From PinkNews:

Notorious anti-LGBT+ author Judith Reisman, who has blamed “homosexuals” for the rise of the Nazi party and the Holocaust, has died aged 85. Reisman spent her three-decade career on a relentless campaign against long-dead sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute which he founded. 

 But Reisman, who has often been described as the “founder of the modern anti-Kinsey movement” believed that the researcher was responsible for everything from pornography, to sexual assault, and even claimed, without evidence, that he was a paedophile. Vehemently anti-LGBT+, Reisman was a supporter of conspiracy theorist Scott Lively’s book The Pink Swastika, which blames gay people for the Holocaust. The author, who had a PhD in communications yet was a visiting law professor at the anti-LGBT+ Liberty University, wrote multiple bizarre research papers, with titles like Kinsey, Sex and Fraud and ‘Soft Porn’ Plays Hardball.

The Southern Poverty Law Center had this to say about Reisman:

If you have heard of Reisman, it’s probably due to her unrelenting pseudoscientific campaign against Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute. In Reisman’s mind, Kinsey is the cause of all things wrong in the world, including pornography and sexual assault. Her latest work, Sexual Sabotage, which was published in 2010 by the far-right conspiracist WND Books, calls Kinsey a “traitor” to America because in Reisman’s mind, he and his researchers deliberately set out to defame the Greatest Generation and destroy the world. She has repeatedly claimed that Kinsey was a pedophile (there is no evidence to support her contentions), and went so far as to sue the Kinsey Institute for defamation in 1991 when they responded to her wild claims. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in 1994, a year after her conservative lawyer left the case. 

Even Kinsey’s death is a conspiracy, in her mind. Reisman claims that he died of “brutal, repetitive self-abuse” (i.e. masturbation) when in fact he died of heart problems and pneumonia. Some of her other theories are equally dubious. She claims that pornography and homosexuality are imbued with what she calls “erototoxins,” or mind-altering chemicals. In her world, pornography literally rewires the brain and makes it susceptible to things like homosexuality. Little wonder, then, that Reisman is also a staunch crusader against homosexuality, which she often falsely links to pedophilia.

 . . .  Reisman kicked off her career in 1984 when she was awarded a huge grant – just over $700,000 – from the Reagan administration’s conservative Department of Justice to study thirty years of American pornography for evidence of child sexual assault.

 Controversy followed, whether it was about the amount she was awarded, the process by which she got the money (awarded by right-wing publisher Alfred Regnery) or other matters. A December, 1984 article in the American University student paper (where Reisman was based at the time) noted that she appeared to have misrepresented herself on her résumé as the author of a book when in fact she was not. Reisman claimed it was a “secretarial error and poor proofreading”. 

Regardless, the study went on, and when it was completed in 1986, it was panned as unscientific. American University refused to publish it. Loretta Haroian (now deceased), an actual expert on childhood and sexuality, called the report “vigilantism: paranoid, pseudoscientific hyperbole with a thinly veiled, hidden agenda.” 

 That didn’t stop Reisman, however. She published the study in 1989 through her own Institute of Media Education (an on-and-off think tank), of which she was the president. She’s been publishing ever since in the right-wing echo chamber. Her articles and commentary appear with frequency in conservative and hard-right publications like WND, RenewAmerica and Human Events. 

Just one thing to say - bye girl. You will not be missed.