This post is part of an on-going series documenting my research on politics and public health during the heart of the AIDS crisis in Minnesota history. For more background on this project please see original post: Once Upon a Reference Question.

So, it’s been a few weeks of Saturday mornings at the library, establishing research practices, pondering findings, and picking up copy requests. I’m happy to report that my research is really starting to take shape: I’ve learned a lot already and I’m excited to see what I will discover next. The bulk of my time thus far has been spent on getting a sense of the Berean League (the sponsoring organization for the AIDS conference in November 1987 which inspired protest).

Discoveries

• The league itself came into being in January 1983, the result of a handful of Evangelical Christian leaders coming together the previous month in reaction to the “void of Christian leadership” that had been the result of 1982 elections. Its stated purpose was to be a “means to carry out a Christian’s stewardship responsibilities for civil government.”
• Early political advocacy appears to be centered on various gay rights legislation at both the city and state level. The first issue of their newsletter The Statesman (April/May 1983) celebrated the defeat of a bill sponsored by Senator Allan Spear that sought to prohibit discrimination based on “sexual or affectional orientation.” You may recognize this in the amending of the Minnesota Human Rights Act which would eventually pass in 1993. Learn more in this Minnesota History article: “Senator Allan Spear and the Minnesota Human Rights Act.”
• The thrust of the organization’s approach to the AIDS epidemic seems to center around the following:
  • Age-appropriate education in schools which focuses on condemning drug use, reserving sex for marriage, and emphasizing that homosexual intercourse is both dangerous and immoral
  • Identifying HIV/AIDS carriers and assessing their willingness to “cease activities which spread the disease and to intervene when necessary.”
  • Blaming gay activists for preventing public health officials from carrying out “standard health practices,” activists having labeled said practices as discriminatory and fascist.
• The League’s influence can also be tied to a parent group in Mora, MN who successfully advocated to cease the use of approved AIDS curriculum in the public school district several weeks before the end of the school year in 1989. The organization is later involved in related work regarding school board elections in that district (and conceivably others).
• The Berean League was very aware of how it was perceived by gay rights activists and the general public. There are notes on publications about not being able to quote out of context, emphasizing that they are against “gay privileges” not “gay rights”, etc.
• Leaders within the Berean League who received significant media attention (beyond the various executive directors) were
  • David Pence (doctor): author of Values in Public Education booklet who called the AIDS crisis “our Vietnam” in a City Pages article in October 1987, stating that “we can’t let the ‘gay lobby’ fight the war for the rest of us.” Note that Pence did spend a year in federal prison in Sandstone for draft resistance.
  • Roger Magnuson (lawyer): author of the book Are “Gay Rights” Right? (published and distributed by the Berean League) back in 1985 and founder of the Straitgate Church in Minneapolis
  • Allen Quist (politician): state senator from Mankato who “alleged that Mankato State University was encouraging the spread of AIDS by sponsoring a counseling center for gays, comparing it to a center for the Ku Klux Klan.” For more information on that see this article from Mother Jones which quotes a 1994 article that ran in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
• The organization changed its name (sometime in 1992) to the Minnesota Family Council. I contacted them to see if their organization had maintained a complete run of the early Berean Statesman newsletters since the bound collection at MNHS is spotty during the 1980s (the heart of my focus), unfortunately they responded that they did not have back issues of this kind (nor were they donated by the organization to any particular repository).

Questions

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

–Albert Einstein

With everything I am learning about AIDS, public health, and political advocacy; more questions are piling up than answers, but that’s the beautiful thing about research. Some of my burning questions are as follows:

• What the heck happened in the 1982 elections in Minnesota that motivated the organization of the Berean League?
• Was the League successful in getting any AIDS related legislation passed or influencing practice within the Minnesota Department of Health?
• When the League references “standard public health practices” and laments they are not being followed, what exactly are they referring to? At this point in my research it seems to be referencing robust contact tracing/contact of past sexual partners, publicly sharing AIDS status, and some level of quarantine.
• What was the League’s relationship to officials in the MN Department of Health, specifically Sister Mary Madonna Ashton (the first woman and the first non-physician to be appointed Commissioner of the department by Governor Rudy Perpich? In reviewing Berean League materials there was a note that the Department of Public Health needed to be more “Elliot Ness” and less “Mother Teresa” so I’m guessing they weren’t close. 😉
• How did various AIDS advocacy organizations react to the work of the Berean League? I’m thinking specifically of the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP), which was founded at the same time (January 1983).

Research Notes

The majority of quotes in this article were taken from a review of the book that inspired this whole project: Values in Public Education. Also heavily consulted were the early issues of the Berean Statesman newsletter and the book Are “Gay Rights” Right? published and distributed by the organization. Significant materials about the Berean League, their views on AIDS, and the 1987 conference were also found in the Minnesota GLBT Movment Papers (Leo Treadway).