I guess it's "Soros vs Ahmanson." I assume you all know who the Author is. The "slant" will drive most here up the wall.
Avenging angel of the religious right
Quirky millionaire Howard Ahmanson Jr. is on a mission from God to stop gay marriage, fight evolution, defeat "liberal" churches -- and reelect George W. Bush.
By Max Blumenthal - Salon
Jan. 6, 2004 | In the summer of 2000, a group of frustrated Episcopalians from the board of the American Anglican Council gathered at a sun-soaked Bahamanian resort to blow off some steam and hatch a plot. They were fed up with the Episcopal Church and what they perceived as a liberal hierarchy that had led it astray from centuries of so-called orthodox Christian teaching. The only option, they believed, was to lead a schism.
But this would take money. After the meeting, Anglican Council vice president Bruce Chapman sent a private memo to the group's board detailing a plan to involve Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a Southern California millionaire, and his wife, Roberta Green Ahmanson, in the plan. "Fundraising is a critical topic," Chapman wrote. "But that topic itself is going to be affected directly by whether we have a clear, compelling forward strategy. I know that the Ahmansons are only going to be available to us if we have such a strategy and I think it would be wise to involve them directly in settling on it as the options clarify." It was a logical pitch: As a key financier of the Christian right with a penchant for anti-gay campaigns, Ahmanson clearly shared the Anglican Council's interest in subverting the left-leaning church. Moreover, Ahmanson and his wife were close friends and prayer partners of David Anderson, the Anglican Council's chief executive, while Chapman and his political team were already enjoying hefty annual grants from Ahmanson to Chapman's think tank, the Discovery Institute.
Soon, the money came rolling in to the Anglican Council, with more than $1 million in donations from Ahmanson in 2000 and 2001. And the newly flush Anglican Council redoubled its anti-gay campaign, climaxing in November when the Episcopal Church consecrated its first openly gay bishop, the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson. With its war chest full and its strongest pretext yet for a schism, the group cranked up a smear campaign against Robinson, falsely accusing him of sexual harassment and administering a bisexual pornography Web site, prompting three wealthy dioceses to split with the Episcopal Church and join the Anglican Council's renegade network. Now more dioceses and parishes are poised to follow, a prospect that threatens to weaken the progressive Episcopal Church's political influence -- 44 members of Congress are Episcopalian -- and provide an important new tableau for right-wing political organizing.
The Episcopal Church split is only a small part of Ahmanson's concerted efforts to radically transform not only American religion, but the nation's moral culture and, thereby, the country itself. His money has made possible some of the most pivotal conservative movements in America's recent history, including the 1994 GOP takeover of the California Assembly, a ban on gay marriage and affirmative action in California, and the mounting nationwide campaign to prove Darwin wrong about evolution. His financial influence also helped propel the recent campaign to recall California Gov. Gray Davis. And besides contributing cash to George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, Ahmanson has played an important role in driving Bush's domestic agenda by financing the career of Marvin Olasky, a conservative intellectual whose ideas inspired the creation of the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
After more than 20 years of politically oriented philanthropy, Ahmanson is now emerging as one of the major financial angels of the right, putting him in the company of Richard Mellon Scaife, the oil and banking heir who bankrolled the groundwork for much of the conservative movement's apparatus and became a household name in the 1990s thanks to his $2.4 million dirty-tricks campaign against President Bill Clinton.
Yet few Americans have heard of Ahmanson -- and that's the way he likes it. Unlike Scaife, Ahmanson donates cash either out of his own pocket or through his unincorporated corporate entity, Fieldstead and Co., to avoid having to report the names of his grantees to the IRS. His Tourette's syndrome only adds to his reclusive persona, as his fear of speaking leads him to shun the media. And while Scaife travels the world in his own jet, Ahmanson shuns luxury for a lifestyle of down-to-earth humility. As his wife of 17 years, Roberta Green Ahmanson, told me, he once gave up his seat on an airplane for a refund. And when he goes out for a spin in his neighborhood in Newport Beach, a posh coastal community 45 minutes south of Los Angeles, he drives a Prius, Toyota's new, environment-friendly hybrid car. It's a modest choice for a man who could afford an entire Hummer dealership, but nevertheless a considerable upgrade from his old Datsun pickup.
At the root of Ahmanson's quirky asceticism and ardent conservatism is his rocky path from cloistered rich kid to Bible-believing philanthropist. Ahmanson's father, Howard Sr., was a savings and loan tycoon whose net worth was valued at over $300 million at the time of his death in 1968. Howard Jr. was only 18 at the time he inherited the fortune. Ejected from his sheltered youth to confront a world suddenly in his palm, the reluctant heir feared that he would never surpass his father's accomplishments; at the same time, he viewed his inherited fortune as a wall separating him from humanity. After wandering the country and the world searching for peace of mind, he returned home in the mid-'70s still a lost soul.
It was then that he found his salvation in the church and in R.J. Rushdoony, a prolific author and an influential theologian of the far right. Rushdoony is the father of Christian Reconstructionism, a strange variant of Calvinism that stresses waging political struggle to put the earth, and in particular the U.S., under the control of biblical law. In his 30-some books, he advocated everything from the end of government-administered social welfare and public schools to the execution of homosexuals. For around 20 years, until Rushdoony's death in 1995, Ahmanson served on the board of his think tank, Chalcedon, granting it a total of $1 million. In exchange, Rushdoony acted as Ahmanson's spiritual advisor, imbuing him with a sense of order and a mission.
Today, Ahmanson says he is more mature than the card-carrying Reconstructionist who told the Orange County Register in 1985: "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives." In brief, written responses to questions I e-mailed to him, he placed special emphasis on his disagreement with Rushdoony's opinion that homosexuals should be executed. "Due to my association with Rushdoony, reporters have often assumed that I agree with him in all applications of the penalties of the Old Testament Law, particularly the stoning of homosexuals," Ahmanson wrote. "My vision for homosexuals is life, not death, not death by stoning or any other form of execution, not a long, lingering, painful death from AIDS, not a violent death by assault, and not a tragic death by suicide. My understanding of Christianity is that we are all broken, in need of healing and restoration. So far as I can tell, the only hope for our healing is through faith in Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection from the dead."
While Ahmanson was reluctant to speak, his wife clarified his views for me in a series of interviews that marked her first encounter with the press since 1992. In our talks, she recounted how she and her husband met in 1984, in their 30s, while she was covering religion and the San Bernardino square-dancing scene for the Orange County Register. As a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist, raised Christian in Perryville, Iowa, schooled at Calvin College, and a teacher at what she called "experimental Christian" schools throughout Canada as a young woman, she made a perfect match for Ahmanson. Two years later they were married. With her media experience and extensive theological education to go with a warm, refreshingly humorous personality that constrasts starkly with her husband's insularity, Mrs. Ahmanson has enthusiastically taken on the role of his able spokesperson and indefatigable guardian.
Roberta Ahmanson made pains to highlight her husband's charitable side, stressing his donations to the Nature Conservancy, the evangelical humanitarian aid group World Vision, and the Orange County Rescue Mission, a Christian homeless shelter that President Bush recently singled out for funding under his faith-based initiative. For her, Ahmanson is a complicated yet balanced man whose political activism and charitable giving are driven by a higher force.
"His goal is -- this is going to sound crazy -- his goal is to do with his money what God wants him to do," she explained.
And why does God want him to give to so many right-wing causes?
"The Christian view of man is that we're not perfect. You don't give to things that base themselves on the optimistic view that human beings are going to be doing it right," Mrs. Ahmanson explained. When I asked if this meant she and her husband would still want to install the supremacy of biblical law, she replied: "I'm not suggesting we have an amendment to the Constitution that says we now follow all 613 of the case laws of the Old Testament ... But if by biblical law you mean the last seven of the 10 Commandments, you know, yeah."
In 1992, Ahmanson banded together with four right-wing businessmen to back the campaigns of anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big business candidates; two years later, they scored their first major victory, propelling the GOP's takeover of the California Assembly. With $3 million funneled through seven pro-business, anti-abortion and Republican political action fronts, Ahmanson and company captured a startling 25 of the GOP's 39 legislative seats for their candidates. Their push ushered two important movement cadres into power: Tom McClintock, a veteran activist and former director of economic and regulatory affairs of the Ahmanson-funded libertarian think tank Claremont Institute; and Ray Haynes, an unknown lawyer from another Ahmanson-funded group, the Western Center for Law and Justice, which once filed a brief defending a local school district for banning Gabriel Garcéa Marquéz's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Upon seizing power, McClintock sponsored a bill returning the death penalty to California, while Haynes led a failed 1995 attempt to ban state funding for abortion and numerous futile fights to block anti-hate crime and domestic partnership legislation. In 2003, the two Ahmanson cadres became instrumental figures in propelling the campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. In March 2003, Haynes personally convinced a fellow arch-conservative, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, to bankroll the recall ballot qualification. After the recall qualified with the help of $1.7 million from Issa, McClintock entered the recall campaign, ultimately finishing third as the token cultural conservative. As in 1992, Ahmanson's camp provided the groundwork for McClintock's campaign: John Stoos, an avowed Reconstructionist associated with Chalcedon, served as his deputy campaign manager, and Ahmanson hosted some of the most prominent leaders in the Christian right for a fundraiser in Colorado in September that, according to the Los Angeles Times, raised $100,000.
To complement his electoral efforts, Ahmanson has pumped enormous amounts of money into ballot measure committees, dramatically altering California's social landscape in the process. In 1999, Ahmanson helped to sharply restrict affirmative action in California with a $350,000 donation to Proposition 209; that same year he helped ban gay marriage with a donation of $210,000 -- 35 percent of all total funds -- to Proposition 22. To avoid giving voters the impression that Prop. 22 was somehow anti-gay, its "Protection of Marriage Committee" spent nearly half of Ahmanson's donation on billboards presenting the measure as "pro-family."
Despite his penchant for behind-the-scenes string-pulling, Ahmanson's anti-gay campaigns have attracted close scrutiny by Jerry Sloan, a Sacramento gay-rights advocate and founder of Project Tocsin.
"Ahmanson's financing of these various initiatives both statewide and locally and his financing of anti-gay legislators who fight tooth and toenail against any legislation that would protect people or enhance our rights as citizens has made the struggle for our rights probably two or three times harder than it should be," Sloan told me. "I can't think of anybody who's more dangerous to the average Californian than Howard Ahmanson."
With President Bush running for reelection cautiously signaling support for a constitutional amendment -- modeled after California's Prop. 22 -- to ban gay marriage, one of Ahmanson's key causes has gone national. And as donors to Bush's 2000 campaign, the Ahmansons couldn't be more pleased with the dividends of their investment. "We supported him the first time and we'll support him again," a doting Mrs. Ahmanson said of Bush.
Ahmanson's money has also sustained the operations of influential Washington insiders like Grover Norquist, an anti-tax lobbyist who once compared the federal income tax to date rape, as well as far-out groups like the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, an evangelical ministry entrenched in the shadows of Berkeley's People's Park working to undermine the local New Age scene, or what its monthly journal has called the "neo-pagans."
As an ardent anti-pornography activist, Ahmanson granted $160,000 in 1997 to the woman who helped bring down Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign, Donna Rice-Hughes, and her group Enough Is Enough, which this year successfully lobbied Congress to provide web filters in public libraries. "While I might advocate less liberty for vice, I recognize that all we can do in most cases is limit it somewhat and drive what remains underground rather than wipe it out," Ahmanson told me.
One of Ahmanson's most significant investments has been in the career of a man Mrs. Ahmanson describes as his "dear friend," Marvin Olasky, the most influential propagandist of the Christian right in the last decade. A former Jew turned Marxist who then converted to Rushdoony's Reconstructionism, Olasky spent most of the 1980s as an obscure journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. His first book, "Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration," was published by Ahmanson's privately held philanthropic entity, the Fieldstead Institute, and was co-authored by Fieldstead's director, Herbert Schlossberg. Though theological scholars ignored the book, it found its way into Washington's conservative circles, and by 1989 Olasky was offered the well-paying Bradley scholarship at the Heritage Foundation.
In 1992, Olasky wrote "The Tragedy of American Compassion," an argument for transferring government social welfare programs to the church. In his book, Olasky cites his "conservative Christian" friend Howard Ahmanson as proof that faith can cure poverty, describing how Ahmanson "found that poverty around the world is a spiritual as well as a material problem -- most poor people don't have faith that they and their situations can change."
Ahmanson told me "The Tragedy of American Compassion" is one of his favorite books, as it articulates his long-standing views on government's role in social welfare. "For government, social service is at best a secondary responsibility; it's a primary responsibility for the philanthropic-religious sector," he explained. "Governments feeding people, and priests and nuns firing cannon in national defense, may sometimes be necessary; but they are not the norm."
In 1993, "The Tragedy of American Compassion" earned Olasky an invitation from political strategist Karl Rove to meet with an evangelical Christian running for governor of Texas -- George W. Bush. Eventually the man Time magazine dubbed the "unlikely guru" would become a key advisor to Bush, instilling in him the politics of "compassionate conservatism." And when President Bush signed an executive order to create a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in January 2001, Olasky was standing by his side, beaming with pride as he watched the new president sign his ideas into government policy.
Another man who owes the success of his work to Ahmanson is Bruce Chapman, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Seattle think tank Discovery Institute, a bastion for the intelligent design movement, which seeks to debunk Darwin's theory of evolution with scientific-sounding arguments. Americans United for Separation of Church and State calls Discovery "the most effective and politically savvy group pushing a religious agenda in America's public school science classes."
Ahmanson has been a major funder of Discovery. According to the Baptist Press, this year Ahmanson granted $2.8 million to the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, Discovery's intelligent design wing. With 48 well-heeled research fellows, directors and advisors, almost all of whom have advanced degrees from respectable universities, the center has given intelligent design a level of influence traditional creationism has not enjoyed.
This September, Discovery lobbied the Texas State Board of Education to mandate language in its high school biology textbooks challenging what Chapman called "fake facts" in evolutionary studies. After a heated debate in which dozens of Discovery fellows and their opponents from the scientific community testified, a panel voted to adopt the textbooks after a promise from the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency that all remaining "factual errors" would be addressed by publishers before the textbooks get into the hands of students. Discovery hailed this as a major victory, but the effect is clear: The fact that both human and other mammal embryos have gill slits -- which proves to mainstream scientists that we share an evolutionary lineage with prehistoric vertebrates -- is slated for "correction."
Since Texas is the second-largest purchaser of textbooks in the nation (next to California), it has a major influence on what publishers decide to put in their books. And so, as it has gone with other cleverly orchestrated Ahmanson-funded campaigns, Discovery's small victory is intended to have national consequences.
Howard Ahmanson Sr. never let politics get in the way of his good name. Most of his $300 million fortune was made driving California's postwar housing boom through his savings and loan company, Home Savings & Loan (known today as Washington Mutual). In his later years, he spent as much as 60 percent of his fortune on philanthropy and today his name is emblazoned on a cardiology center at UCLA's Medical Center, an entire wing at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and one of Los Angeles' premier theaters. The young Ahmanson was raised to continue this legacy.
End of Part one |
