Timothy LaHaye

Timothy F. "Tim" LaHaye was an evangelical Christian minister, author of several books (most notably the Left Behind series), and was a primal voice of American fundamentalism and the Religious Right. He was the husband of Beverly LaHaye, the founder of the Concerned Women for America (CWA). LaHaye died on July 25, 2016 after suffering from a stroke, aged 90.
==Political activism==
LaHaye was at one time a member of the John Birch Society.Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by Matthew Dallek (2023) Basic Books. ISBN 1541673565. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, LaHaye became involved in politics with the Christian Voice (USA), and promoted or started numerous groups to promote his conservative viewpoints. In 1972, he helped establish the Institute for Creation Research at Christian Heritage College (later named San Diego Christian College) in El Cajon, California, doing so along with its founder, Henry Morris. In 1979, he encouraged Jerry Falwell to establish the Moral Majority and sat on its board of directors.Robert Dreyfuss. "Reverend Doomsday: According to Tim LaHaye, the Apocalypse is now". Rolling Stone. January 28, 2004.Michelle Goldberg. "Fundamentally unsound". Salon.com. July 29, 2002.
==Crank views==
===Homosexuality===
As one may expect from a fundamentalist Christian like LaHaye, he was also a raging homophobe. To present this view to the public as well as to his cohorts, he published The Unhappy Gays, which was later retitled What Everyone Should Know Imagine About Homosexuality where he spews forth notions that homosexuality is "militant, organized and vile." Of course, the screed reduces to false assertions, unproved data, and outright lies. The book argues that gays share 16 pernicious traits, including "incredible promiscuity," "deceit," "selfishness," "vulnerability to sadism-masochism" and "poor health and an early death." LaHaye seriously claimed that those who accept gays are more "cruel and inhuman those who practiced Old Testament capital punishment" on gays. He had called his hate tract "a model of compassion." He believed that homosexuality can be cured.Michael Schaub. "The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about". Bookslut. October 2002.Bob Moser. "Holy War". Southern Poverty Law Center. Accessed December 20, 2007. However, he said that such conversions are rare.Thomas C. Caramagno. Irreconcilable Differences? Intellectual Stalemate in the Gay Rights Debate. Praeger/Greenwood. 2002. page 159.
===Conspiracy theories===
LaHaye was a firm believer in the Illuminati and it is one of several groups that he believed will "turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state." Because of his paranoid delusion of crank magnetism, he had an irrational distrust of several organizations including the Trilateral Commission, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, "the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and news magazines," the State Department, major philanthropic foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, "the left wing of the Democratic Party", Harvard, Yale, "and 2,000 other colleges and universities."Robert Dreyfuss. "Reverend Doomsday: According to Tim LaHaye, the Apocalypse is now". Rolling Stone. January 28, 2004.
==References==
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