The Problem With Marianne Williamson
The problem with Marianne Williamson is she has a fan base amongst younger LGBT+ people, whilst older LGBT+ people know what she’s really done and said. Younger people see her past history with food delivery and helping people find housing against landlord discrimination and think that makes her an ally and a good person. Older people also know what she was really doing.
I would encourage you to read through the articles below, written during her last campaign.
The Toxic Allure of Marianne Williamson’s Health-Based Politics (Elle, August 4, 2019)
But her views on the origin of illness have often reflected a growing conspiratorial mindset over actual fact. Williamson has vaguely and dangerously questioned vaccine safety in the past, and at a campaign event in June called mandatory vaccinations “Orwellian.” She has since apologized for the remark and insisted she is not anti-vaccine or “anti-science,” but in an MSNBC interview on Wednesday, she went ahead and loosely (and without evidence) linked vaccines to a rise in chronic disease. She also recently fumbled with the New York Times over her belief that anti-depressants are overprescribed and a past comment she made calling clinical depression a “scam.” She’s apologized for that particular assertion, but stood by her tweet linking the designer Kate Spade’s suicide, again without evidence, to anti-depressant use and Big Pharma.
(more)
From The Advocate, September 20, 2019:
At LGBTQ Forum, Marianne Williamson Responds to Her History With AIDS
After declaring she would push for the passage of the Equality Act, an end to “conversion therapy” and the trans military ban, Williamson was asked by Advocate editor-in-chief Zach Stafford whether she believed — as has been reported — whether she believed AIDS could be cured from positive thoughts.
“I never said anything like that,” Williamson said. “There’s nothing in my books like that.” Williamson said the narrative that she believed AIDS could be cured psychically were part of “vicious smears.”
Marianne Williamson said on Twitter that anything said about what she wrote in her book was a smear. She was well-known to the LGBT+ community long before she became a household name because she set up shop to assist the community with housing and food. However, what she wrote in her book “A Return to Love” (1992) is far different. (more after the tweets)
Among the many lies out there now there is one saying I told people with AIDS not to take their medicine - repeated even by supposedly reputable sources. Please read this and share with others. It is by someone who was actually there. https://t.co/nqUBAlLzO0
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) August 3, 2019
Here, Williamson wrote SEVEN PAGES of letters to and from the AIDS virus (because…of course) and refers to AIDS as “Angels-In-Darth Vader-Suits” - equipped with an elaborate display of imagery about said Darth Vader.
(via @gbrockell) pic.twitter.com/uPH7DWUD8K
— Kelly (@kellyblaus) August 8, 2019
Why is Marianne Williamson trending? She is a two bit, grifter whose books are an atrocity. She apparently met Jesus at a party. Not an analogy, she says she shook his hand. I read her books so you don’t have to!
— Jennifer Gunter (@DrJenGunter) December 20, 2020
(Bette Midler attacked Dr. Gunter over that, because a lot of people only see such things as Marianne Williamson’s food delivery or other help for AIDS patients and don’t see her woo-curing positive thinking for AIDS or antivaxxer stances.)
From Slate, August 7, 2019.
The Gay Divide Over Marianne Williamson
Among queer people who’ve known Williamson and her work for decades, though, she and her teachings have been a more contentious subject. Since Williamson made headlines during the first debate, LGBTQ people who lived through the AIDS crisis have been sharing painful memories on social media. In a tweet that went viral during last Tuesday’s debate, Stephen Guy-Bray, a 59-year-old English professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote, “Seeing young gays make [Williamson] into some kind of camp icon fills me with fury & despair. But mostly it just makes me so fucking tired.”
In the midst of a deadly epidemic with no known treatment or cure, these people recall, Williamson offered metaphysical teachings, in the tradition known as New Thought, about the spiritual roots of disease. One HIV-positive man wrote on Facebook that Williamson had harmed people with AIDS by “conning” them into “believing they deserved their biological condition—and even their deaths—because they weren’t spiritually fit enough to visualize the AIDS virus away.” A woman who commended Williamson on supporting some people with AIDS tweeted that “those of us who were there for others dealt with the outcome of OUR friends reading her words and blaming themselves for their lack of positivity.”
“I turned on the TV to watch the end of the debate, realized who she was and went into a rage, screaming at the fucking TV,” the author Rabih Alameddine tweeted in June. “Had no idea that horror was still alive. I had friends who died in 80s and 90s thinking they were unworthy because they couldn’t love enough.”
(more)
From the Elle article above, another quote:
“Cancer and AIDS and other serious illnesses,” Williamson wrote in her 1992 bestseller A Return to Love, “are physical manifestations of a psychic scream, and their message is not ‘Hate me,’ but ‘Love me.’” Williamson says she has never advocated against the use of lifesaving medication (which wasn’t available in effective forms for HIV/AIDS until 1996), claiming in a recent Guardian interview that her spiritual guidance was meant to be taken in tandem with medical treatment. But she has inescapably written that “sick thinking” produces sickness in the body. Though Williamson acknowledges the existence of very direct evidence to the contrary, her argument that this is sometimes societal “sick thinking” doesn’t track either, as Lindsay Bayerstein underlines at City and State.
(more)
Via Pink News, August 3, 2019.
Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson told AIDS patients that sickness is ‘an illusion’
Williamson gained a following among gay men during the AIDS crisis, co-founding the Los Angeles Center for Living that focused on spiritualism and “non-medical services.”
In a 1992 Los Angeles Times profile about the center, Williamson had claimed: “The AIDS virus is not more powerful than God.”
The same year she published book A Return to Love, in which she claimed that “cancer and AIDS and other physical illnesses are physical manifestations of a psychic scream.”
(more)