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."
On the question
of executing gays, he further broke with Rushdoony in a
written response to Salon in 2004. "Reporters have often
assumed that I agree with [Rushdoony] 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."
Rushdoony also
championed segregation; in what was reportedly one of
Ahmanson's favorite texts, "The Politics of
Guilt and Pity," he wrote: "The guilty rich
will indulge in philanthropy, and the guilty white men
will show 'love' and 'concern' for Negroes and other such
persons who are in actuality repulsive and intolerable
to them.... The Negroes demand more aid, i.e.,
more slavery and slave-care, and dwell on their
sufferings."
While no
reporters have found reason to believe that Ahmanson
subscribes to Rushdoony's rabid racism, he does
appear to put faith in the idea of predestination
-- that certain people are elected to fill certain
roles and mustn't let the fate of those less
fortunate distract them from their God-given calling.
Fate heavily
informs one of Ahmanson's only known writings,
"Three New Testament Roots of Economic
Liberty," a 1997 meditation on economic
justice in which he uses biblical passages and the
works of Jesus to argue against equitable distribution of
resources, minimum wage, labor laws, and charity for
charity's sake.
Ahmanson launches
his discussion with the New Testament passage Luke 4:3:
"The devil said to him, 'If you are the
Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.'
"
When we consider
how to address the scarcity of food and land, Ahmanson
says, we must be careful what we ask for. "If someone
decrees, therefore, that the demands of justice
require large amounts of certain scarce resources to
exist in order to meet certain vast needs, he submits to the
temptation that Jesus resisted, the temptation to turn
stones into bread," he writes.
"Property
rights are not somehow inferior to other human rights,"
Ahmanson continued. "They are the only juridical rights to
resources, the only economic rights that exist. Health
care is a finite resource; therefore every human being
cannot have a juridical right to health care. If every
human being is to have modern health care, it requires that
resources be commanded into existence."
Later, he
addresses the meaning of the many biblical passages devoted
to compassion for the poor: "On a couple of
occasions Jesus even recommended people to divest
their properties and give the proceeds to the poor
(Matthew 19:21, Luke 12:33-34). On these occasions, however,
Jesus had the spiritual good of the people primarily
in view; the fact that more resources were made
available to the poor was a secondary consideration."
Ahmanson
concludes: "We often hear arguments that we ought not
to build a beautiful building, commission a work of
art, host a celebration, or even provide for the
defense of our nation, because there are poor in the
world. The argument that we ought not do any particular
thing because the poor exist is the argument of Judas,
and if you hear it made, know that thieves are about
who want to get their piece of the action."
The piece offers
an interesting lens through which to view a man who
inherited his father's fortune at age 18 and was
burdened by the enormity of how to administer that
legacy. Ahmanson seemed to find grounding in an
interpretation of the Bible that not only affirmed his
destiny but also his right to use that destiny however
he presumed would bring him closer to God.
Sometimes the
public has sided with Ahmanson's divine inspiration
-- as with his insight that affirmative action
should be outlawed as a consideration in admitting
students to California's public institutions.
Proposition 209, known as the California Civil Rights
Initiative, was passed by 54% of voters in 1996.
At other times, public opinion has parted with
Ahmanson's messianic mission, like when he and his
cohort mounted an effort to dismantle the
state's no-fault divorce law, which since 1970
has made it easier for married couples to dissolve their
sacred unions.
Apparently,
Ahmanson hopes to advance the Christian right's
famous one-man, one-woman phrase to the less popular
trinity "One man, one woman, one time."
What remains to be seen is if the same voters who want
to reserve their right to marry in perpetuity would restrict
others from exercising that right just once.
