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screen shot from today's Cincinnati Enquirer

Via Issue 3 was voters' right - City opens defense in gay-rights trial by Sharon Maloney, The Cincinnati Post,  June 23, 1994:

...Issue 3, a charter amendment that repealed the gay-rights section of the city's human-rights ordinance. Issue 3 also prohibited City Council, city boards and commissions from enacting or considering gay-rights legislation in the future.

...Chris Finney, a Greater Cincinnati attorney who wrote the language of Issue 3, said its main intent was "to take away from council the right to pass this (gay rights) kind of legislation and return the right to the people." He said landlords and employers have the right not to rent to gays or employ gays if they object to their lifestyles.

Via The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War by Dan Gilgoff, 2008, St, Martins Griffin:
 
Via Gay Marriage Case Caps Cincinnati’s Shift From Conservative Past by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in yesterday's New York Times.

In 1992, Cincinnati, under Democratic leadership, adopted a law banning discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation. Phil Burress, a former union organizer who runs the advocacy group Citizens for Community Values, decided to put a stop to it. From his office in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville, Mr. Burress, 73, has spent decades working to stamp out pornography, strip clubs and what he calls “the homosexual agenda.”

In 1993, he mobilized a successful voter initiative to amend the city charter that stated, “No special class status may be granted based upon sexual orientation, conduct or relationships.” It passed with 62 percent of the vote. Known as Article 12, the amendment barred Cincinnati from adopting any kind of law — such as hate crimes legislation or anti-discrimination bills — aimed explicitly at protecting gay people.

...In 2004, Cincinnati voters repealed Article 12, by 54 percent to 46 percent.

From an October 20, 2004 full-page Enquirer ad paid for by Focus on the Family:

RIGHT TO LEFT (March 2005): My brother, former Cincinnati city councilman/former Hamilton County commissioner Phil Heimlich; his wife/my sister-in-law, Rebecca Heimlich; Christopher Finney, my father's attorney and former law partner at Finney, Stagnaro, Saba and Patterson; two guys I don't recognize; former Ohio Representative Tom Brinkman (in green suit); former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro. (source)

Via Henry Heimlich: At 94, Cincinnati's famous, polarizing doctor still working to shape his legacy by staff reporter Lucy May, WCPO-Digital, February 9, 2014. (The story's behind a subscription paywall -- click here for the page with the quote.)

(Dr.) Heimlich also persists in arguing malariotherapy – the practice of injecting patients with a curable form of malaria – should be researched as a possible treatment for AIDS and other diseases.

...A World Health Organization report called Heimlich-backed experiments in the late 1990s that infected AIDS patients in China with malaria one of the “atrocities” committed by doctors in recent memory.

But Heimlich hasn’t backed down on either.

For his staunchest supporters, that’s all they need to hear.

“I can assure you if I had AIDS or another disease he thought it might work with –- shoot me up,” Heimlich’s son, Phil, said of malariotherapy.

The article does not report that Phil is the longtime vice president of the Heimlich Institute, the Cincinnati nonprofit that funded and supervised the experiments on Chinese AIDS patients and other "malariotherapy" experiments conducted on U.S. and foreign patients in Mexico, Panama, Ethiopia, and Gabon.


This item has been updated.

As I reported last week, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews published corrections to their reviews of my father's forthcoming autobiography being published in a few weeks by Prometheus Books, Heimlich's Maneuvers.

The updated reviews rightly credited the eminent Romanian surgeon, the late Dr. Dan Gavriliu, with inventing a surgical procedure that for decades my father falsely (and shamelessly) claimed to have invented.

Since then I've gotten two more published corrections -- and the book hasn't even been published yet!

Barrett Brunsman (source)

My first score was in Heimlich’s Maneuvers: Autobiography of Cincinnati doctor acknowledges controversy, a January 21st Cincinnati Business Courier feature by staff reporter Barrett Brunsman.

Before getting to that, let me give big ups to Brunsman for his recent article about Queen City attorney Christopher Finney's departure from his own law firm.

"(An) arch-conservative legal activist who has a history of working on anti-gay rights causes," Finney has been my father's attorney for at least a decade.

Per a must-read 2006 Cincinnati CityBeat story by Kevin Osborne about a fanny-slapping freak-out that made Finney the literal butt of ensuing jokes, he also co-owned a real estate business with my brother Phil called Three Centurions:

The company apparently is named after a term coined by millionaire evangelist Bill Gothard, whom (Phil) Heimlich admires.

Back to Brunsman's story about my father's long-delayed memoir, here's a screenshot from the original article:


But per this lengthy correction I obtained from the Voice of America re: reporter Adam Phillips's error-ridden 2009 story, Dr. Henry Heimlich, Medical Innovator:

After I sent him the VOA correction, Brunsman promptly e-mailed me a thank-you and informed me he'd changed "credited with saving the lives of thousands of wounded American soldiers" to:

I replied:

I'd suggest that "hundreds of" is more accurate and informative to readers. Your opinion?

No answer. No further update.

Hundreds of lives, thousands of lives? Like whatever, dude.

Psst, Barrett, if you're reading this, you probably did the right thing by not contradicting my father's claim.

Last year, after the Biz Courier published a story by staff reporter James Ritchie that included critical information about my father, the article was disappeared and editor Rob Daumeyer refused to discuss it.

That's too bad, because I wanted to ask him if someone at Deaconess Associations, the $350 million health care corporation that owns the Heimlich Institute, had pulled his choke chain.

I got another correction from an unexpected venue, a new website called HenryHeimlich.com, apparently set up to promote Heimlich's Maneuvers.

Here's a screen shot last week from my father's bio page on the site:


To quote Borat -- NOT!

Melinda Zemper (source)

So I sent the correct information (which I'd obtained from a New York State agency) to Melinda Zemper, press agent for the Heimlich Institute and Deaconess, and a board member of the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting.

Here's the resulting fix on the page as of today:



To anyone else writing about my father's career, if you need a fact-checker, per Chris Montez's groovy, improbable 1966 hit version of the classic song written by the great Tony Hatch, here's my invitation: