Will the same man who bankrolled a Republican takeover of the California assembly in 1994, underwrote an amendment that gutted the state’s affirmative action law in 1996, and fostered the birth of the schism within the Episcopal Church over its gay-inclusive leanings now succeed in taking away the marriage rights of tens of thousands of gays and lesbians in California on November 4?
Weighing in with $900,000 of his own money, Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a conservative philanthropist and highly influential political donor, is one of the single biggest benefactors of the campaign to pass a ban on gay marriage in California, Proposition 8.
Though Ahmanson is notorious in California circles and has been the subject of several comprehensive pieces in Salon.com , The Orange County Register , and the Episcopal diocese of Washington among others, the reclusive philanthropist -- who almost never speaks to the press -- isn’t on the radar of many Americans even as his impact is being felt across the nation.
Searching Ahmanson on the Internet reveals the tale of a socially conservative ideologue who has put his money where his mouth is, assiduously flexing the muscle of his multimillion-dollar fortune to bend the country’s political system to the will of his worldview.
According to multiple reports, he and his friends poured more than $4 million into winning enough Republican seats in the early '90s to briefly wrest control of the California assembly from Democrats; he put $350,000 into dramatically weakening the state’s affirmative action laws (Proposition 209) and $210,000 –- 35% of total funding, according to Salon –- into banning recognition of gay marriages from other states (Prop. 22) in 1999; and perhaps his most cataclysmic deed to date was his funneling of $1 million to the American Anglican Council, which helped fuel the rift over gays that has besieged the Episcopal Church. (The Advocate reported more about the upshot of conservative Anglicans’ antigay crusade here.)
Ahmanson’s moral certitude stems from a variant of Calvinism known as the Christian Reconstructionist movement, founded by the far-right Reverend Rousas John Rushdoony, who has promoted philosophies that might well be considered draconian by modern standards. In his 1973 tome “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” Rushdoony concluded that the Bible instructs society to execute people for 18 sins, including: murder, rape of a betrothed virgin, adultery, promiscuity by unwed women, homosexuality, sodomy, striking or cursing a parent, habitual criminality, blasphemy, and bearing false witness. During an interview with Bill Moyers in 1987, Rushdoony said of the death penalty, “This is what God requires.”
Ahmanson considered Rushdoony a close spiritual guide –- close enough to be at his bedside when Rushdoony left this world in 2001 -– and, in line with his teacher’s thinking, Ahmanson told The Orange County Register in 1985, “My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives.”
But his later interviews, few as they are, indicate some awareness of the disconnect between Rushdoony’s prescription for social order and that embraced by most of the developed world. In 2004, Ahmanson told the Register, “I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think –- and I'm not sure about this –- that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned. I no longer consider that essential. It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things. But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity.”
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