Twelve days before Reagan was elected president in November, 1980, Christians for Reagan, a supposedly independent lobby organized to capture the fundamentalist vote for the Republican nominee, announced that it would pay for a barrage of advertisements throughout the South, which attacked President Carter for “catering” to homosexuals. Citing the language of the Democratic party platform, Gary Jarmin, national director of Christians for Reagan, described the purpose of the campaign this way: “If there's any reason at all they should oppose Carter, this is it.” On one spot, an announcer intoned, “The gays in San Francisco elected a mayor; now they're going to elect a president.” Before the ads began, polls had shown that Carter, a born-again Christian, still had considerable support among the Evangelicals. But the hard-hitting TV spots were extremely effective, and they helped Reagan carry every Southern state except Georgia, where Carter had been governor. Partly because the commercials never aired in New York or Washington, most people outside the South were never aware of them.…
From
The Real Record of the Reagans on Gays and AIDS by Charles Kaiser