William Dannemeyer, a seven-term congressman from Fullerton who favored an extreme vision of social conservatism that came to symbolize Orange County politics, died Tuesday at age 86 after battling dementia.

“He represented Orange County in its heyday as a conservative bastion,” said Jon Fleischman, an Orange County GOP strategist who publishes the FlashReport website.

Best known in the House for his opposition of abortion and LGBT rights — he once read into the congressional record detailed descriptions of sexual acts that he said were favored by gay men — Dannemeyer’s first brush with politics came as a Democrat, when he won an Assembly seat in Los Angeles. In 1964, he cast an Electoral College vote for President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1968, two years after losing to a Republican in a failed bid for state Senate, Dannemeyer appeared on a Los Angeles TV show to announce his switch to the GOP, saying the Democratic party had become too liberal for his taste. The show’s host was Bob Dornan, a former actor and future congressman who, in the 1980s, would team up with Dannemeyer as the national avatars of Orange County conservatism.

“I always considered that an honor,” Dornan said Tuesday, recalling Dannemeyer’s announcement.

Dannemeyer was born in Long Beach and graduated from Long Beach Poly High in 1946.

In the 1960s, Dannemeyer, an attorney, moved to Fullerton and began to build a new political career as a Republican from Orange County. He won a second term in the state Assembly, in 1976, and supported California’s landmark tax law, Prop. 13. In 1978, as California voters passed Prop. 13, Dannemeyer won his first bid for the House, beating Democrat Bill Farris to represent the 39th Congressional District, which included much of northern Orange County.

Over the next six elections, as he gained national fame — or in the eyes of many critics, infamy — for his ideas on issues such as AIDS prevention and phone sex, Dannemeyer became a favorite in his GOP-leaning district. He never took less than 65% of the vote, and left the seat only to run for the U.S. Senate. In 1992, he lost his first Senate bid without reaching the general election, and repeated the process two years later when the GOP Senate candidate was Michael Huffington.

“He was always more about the ideology than party politics,” said Dannemeyer’s son, Bruce Dannemeyer, an attorney in Rancho Santa Margarita. “That made it tougher when he ran for Senate, and probably needed party support.”

Dannemeyer’s political reputation was built in the House, where he was a consistent voice in favor of a balanced budget and lower spending on social issues, and a voice against gay rights, abortion and, late in his career, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“He was one of the few, few members who was not afraid to take on every moral issue in the country,” said Dornan, Tuesday, who served with Dannemeyer for eight years as the representative from CA-38, which at the time covered much of central Orange County.

His anti-gay, anti-abortion stances helped Dannemeyer earn the distinction of being the only politician at that time who got Rush Limbaugh to make a personal appearance at his fundraiser, according to Dornan. And he was one of the men that Dornan said President Ronald Reagan referred to as the “fabulous five.”

Others weren’t as supportive.

As the AIDS crisis worsened in the 1980s, Dannemeyer became a target for many gay rights supporters and members of the medical community who noted that his political positions were often intertwined with inaccurate claims about the disease.

In the mid-1980s, Dannemeyer endorsed a plan to quarantine people with HIV or AIDS. He also spoke against allowing nurses with HIV to work with children, saying (incorrectly) that people with the virus emitted a ‘spore’ that caused birth defects.

Others grew frustrated with the sometimes confrontational style that came with Dannemeyer’s version of conservatism. In 1990, Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson wrote of Reps. Dannemeyer, Dornan and Dana Rohrabacher, who represented coastal voters in Washington:

“Three mouthy congressmen from Reagan country have wandered so far to the right that they’re beginning to make nuisances of themselves on Capitol Hill.”

In 1990, Dannemeyer was one of 21 members of congress to vote against the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Not every vote reflected strident social conservatism. In 1988, Dannemeyer voted in favor of a bill to issue a formal apology, and reparations, to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II.

Fleischman, who got to know Dannemeyer when he worked with the activist group Young Americans for Freedom — and who later volunteered on Dannemeyer’s U.S.Senate campaign — said the long-time politician was “a very principled” conservative who became “the ideological backbone” of the county’s Congressional delegation.

Dannemeyer consistently favored less government spending on social issues and cuts to environmental regulation. In 1990, he voted to suspend enforcement of the Clean Air Act until an economic recovery was underway, a bill that failed. When he ran for Senate, in ’92, Dannemeyer’s platform called for a repeal of 1990 federal tax increases and a rollback for environmental regulations.

After he left Congress, Dannemeyer spent years going back to Washington to push for a Constitutional amendment to allow school prayer.

“He set up an office of sorts in the House gym,” Bruce Dannemeyer said of his father’s work on the prayer issue. “It was close to his heart.”

But Dannemeyer’s post House role in Washington politics also included a push to discredit the Clinton administration.

In 1994, Dannemeyer wrote a letter to congressional leaders detailing a list of 24 people who had been connected to President Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton who had died “under other than natural circumstances.” He learned of the list from a Clinton foe, who had compiled it a year earlier, but Dannemeyer used his role as a former House member to call for hearings on the issue.

Though the Clintons were not connected to the deaths, and the issue wasn’t formally taken up by the House, it remains a resource of sorts for anti-Clinton conservatives and others.

In 1999, Dannemeyer’s wife of 44 years, Evie, died. Five years later he married Lorraine Day, a physician known for promoting controversial cancer treatments — and for publicly questioning the Holocaust. Day — and, later, Dannemeyer — suggested that Jewish people are behind a push to destroy Christianity.

Bruce Dannemeyer distanced himself from those statements, saying Tuesday that “any thinking person would find those views repugnant.”

Instead, Bruce Dannemeyer described a loving, kind father — “the guy who coached Little League” — and suggested he was at least as interested in helping individual constituents as he was in his more controversial public statements.

But Bruce Dannemeyer also noted that his father remained conservative throughout his life. When asked how William Dannemeyer would respond to the county’s all-Democrat congressional delegation, Bruce Dannemeyer laughed and said: “It would be closer to outrage than passive acceptance.”

William Dannemeyer is survived by his wife, Day, his son Bruce, his daughters Kim Davis and Susan Hirzel, 10 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.