Avenging angel of the religious right - Ahmanson

[Vrai]

Subject:
Date:
Tue, 6 Jan 2004 16:48:42 -0500
From:
Claudia Lynch <[e-mail]>
Reply-To:
Quiet Communication <[e-mail]>
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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

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 Legislature, 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 DC-7 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
<http://www.chalcedon.edu/>, 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."

Ahmanson's first major political success came in 1992, when he banded
together with four right-wing businessmen to back the campaigns of
anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big business candidates to take over the
California state Assembly. With $3 million funneled through seven
pro-business, anti-abortion and Republican political action fronts,
Ahmanson and company tipped the balance of the Legislature to the
Republicans, capturing a startling 25 of the GOP's 39 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
<http://www.latimes.com/la-me-mcclintockmain28sep28,1,2941055.story>.

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
<http://www.rthoughtsrfree.org/tocsin.htm>.

"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 <http://www.scp-inc.org>, 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."
<http://www.scp-inc.org/publications/newsletters/N2401/index.php>

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
<http://dir.salon.com/business/green/2000/09/12/donna/index.html>, which
this year successfully lobbied
<http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/1997/fall/greatgrants.html>
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 the new,
evangelical 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 <http://www.discovery.org/>, 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
<http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs5023.htm> "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
<http://www.baptist2baptist.net/b2barticle.asp?ID=147> 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
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/05/textbooks/index.html> 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.

Howard Jr. was born in 1950, when his father was 44. By that time,
according to Roberta Ahmanson, the elder Ahmanson was "in his palatial
stage," feting visiting kings and queens and basking in the opulence of
his three-lot mansion on Harbor Island, an exclusive peninsula jutting
out into San Diego Bay. Meanwhile, young Ahmanson was tended to by an
army of servants and ferried to and from school in a limousine. As he
watched the world go by behind darkened windows, he was gripped with a
longing to cast off his wealth and disappear into anonymity. He came to
burn with resentment toward his father, a remote, towering presence who
burdened him with high expectations. "I resented my family background,"
he told the Register in 1985. " could never be a role model,
whether by habits or his lifestyle, it was never anything I wanted."

His youth was plagued with loneliness and loss. At age 10, his mother
served his father with divorce papers. A few years later, she died.
Then, when Howard was 18, his father died too, sinking him into
spiraling depths of despair and therapy. To escape his background,
Ahmanson drifted to the far-off plains of Kansas and enrolled part-time
in college classes. "It was like taking the lid off a pressure cooker,"
Mrs. Ahmanson recalls of her husband's self-imposed exile.

Ahmanson returned to California to attend Occidental College, where he
earned generally poor marks as an economics major. After graduating with
a bachelor's degree, he spent a year backpacking through Europe and
"being grungy," as he told the Register. He might have stayed there,
living off his trust fund, if not for a bout with arthritis, an
affliction he later would call his "miracle disease." This sent him back
to the States, where he earned his master's degree in linguistics at the
University of Texas at Arlington. Because he suffers from Tourette's
syndrome, a disease that makes stringing sentences together a
frustrating ordeal -- "like a slow modem," his wife explains -- the
degree reflected a major triumph. In his single-minded determination to
overcome his handicap, Ahmanson became fluent in Japanese, Spanish and
German.

When Ahmanson came back to Orange County driving an old Datsun pickup
and dressed in clothing more befitting a Seattle alt-rocker than a
trust-fund baby, it was clear he was still struggling with the burden of
guilt left to him by his father. With millions at his disposal, he had
imposed an allowance of $1,200 a month upon himself. Most of his
fraternity brothers from Occidental had become evangelical Christians
while he was away and reconnecting with them also sparked a new interest
for him. He joined a singles group organized by Mariners Church, a
Bible-based, nondenominational church in Newport Beach, which he credits
with his spiritual and social salvation. It was there, he told the
Register, that he was convinced to take full advantage of his
inheritance and to stop "cheating God."

Ahmanson sold his stock in his father's company and invested it in
lucrative real estate acquisitions, with a goal of earning returns of 20
to 25 percent per year. That assured that his wealth would grow quickly,
but it made him feel vulnerable to people who would manipulate his guilt
complex to get a cut of his fortune. These were usually the people
closest to him -- girlfriends, family members and friends. In one
instance, his former roommate at Occidental asked him to fund his surf
shop, explaining that the shop could bring in potential Christian
converts off the street. Ahmanson wasn't convinced. "If you don't do
this, these kids will go to hell," his roommate threatened. In that very
hour, according to his wife, he became a full-fledged Calvinist, giving
himself to Calvin's doctrine of predestination, which holds that God
"elects" individuals for salvation based on factors beyond their control.

"If someone's eternal goal is dependent on him giving a
grant, then we're all in trouble," Mrs. Ahmanson explained. "So that
made Calvin's approach that God is in charge of all of this quite
appealing." Ahmanson's sudden religious turn did not automatically lead
him to right-wing political activism, according to his wife. He voted
for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and, as Mrs. Ahmanson claims, was not
politicized until 1979, when the Orange County Rescue Mission, a
Christian homeless shelter where he played piano once a week, was
condemned when the city of Santa Ana failed to issue it a conditional
use permit. As Mrs. Ahmanson recounts, her husband was outraged by what
he considered an act of government tyranny; as he stood on a picket line
outside the doomed shelter, he became an ardent believer in God-given
property rights and the spirit of capitalism.

But contrary to his wife's account, evidence suggests Ahmanson's
political conversion was not exactly the result of a heroic epiphany.
According to Sloan, founder of Project Tocsin in Sacramento, Ahmanson
became a board member <http://www.skepticfiles.org/fw/alliance.htm> of
Rushdoony's Chalcedon in the mid-'70s, so by the time he was picketing
outside the Mission, he was fully immersed in the right-wing politics
that are part and parcel of Chalcedon.

Whatever the case, Ahmanson's Calvinist ideology rapidly crystallized
under Rushdoony's tutelage. As Mrs. Ahmanson told me, Rushdoony was like
a father figure to her husband when he was young and wayward. "Howard
got to know Rushdoony and Rushdoony was very good to him when he was a
young man and my husband was very grateful and supported him to his
death," she said, adding that they were with Rushdoony at his deathbed.

The Ahmansons today bristle at questions about their past alliance with
Rushdoony: "It's like, 'Have you now or ever been?'" remarked Mrs.
Ahmanson, comparing journalistic inquiries about her husband's links to
Rushdoony to McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics. Yet it is only by
understanding this little-known cleric that one can grasp the philosphy
behind Ahmanson's politics. "I discovered his works at a time when I had
no clear vision for Christian philanthropy and no model that I liked,"
Ahmanson told me of Rushdoony. "Here was someone responding to questions
that in the late '70s no one was even asking."

Rushdoony descended from six generations of Armenian priests,
aristocracy in the world's oldest Christian country. His parents
narrowly escaped the Armenian genocide, in which over 1.5 million
Armenians were massacred by Turks attempting to "Ottomanize" the
country. As a young boy growing up in New York, Rushdoony was haunted by
tales of the slaughter that persisted despite impassioned pleas from the
Armenian clergy for foreign intervention. As Rushdoony made his way
through conservative seminaries during the 1940s and '50s, he was
gripped by a bitter cynicism about the betrayal that became his driving
force.

"His whole life's work was aimed at finding a philosophy that would
stand against the kind of tyranny his parents had to flee," Ahmanson
explained.

Rushdoony spelled out his philosophy in painstaking detail in his 1973
magnum opus, "Institutes of Biblical Law," which he self-consciously
named after John Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion." In the
800-page tome, Rushdoony presents his vision for a new America in which
the church subsumes the federal government and society is administered
according to biblical law, or at least his interpretation of it.
According to biblical law, he writes, segregation is a "basic
principle," and slavery is permitted "because some people are by nature
slaves and will always be so." Those who don't comply with Rushdoony's
rules -- disobedient children, "pagans," adulterers, women who get
abortions, repeat criminal offenders and, of course, homosexuals --
would be executed. Mrs. Ahmanson, who described Rushdoony as "quirky in
some ways," qualified his extremism: "To impose the death penalty you
need two witnesses. So the number of executions goes down pretty quickly."

Though Ahmanson has read "Institutes of Biblical Law," he told me he
prefers books by Rushdoony that deal more explicitly with ethical and
moral issues. One such book is "The Politics of Guilt and Pity," a
polemical suite of caustic riffs
<http://www.serve.com/thibodep/cr/negro.htm> on the pathology of
liberals. In this book, Rushdoony writes: "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."

There is no indication that Ahmanson shares Rushdoony's bellicose
racism, but Rushdoony's scathing critique of "the guilty rich" resonated
with the young man constantly beset upon by human parasites seeking a
chunk of his money. In possibly his only published piece of work
<http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/article.php?id=219>, a 1997 essay
for the Acton Institute, a conservative religious think tank, Ahmanson
parroted Rushdoony's harsh style and viewpoint: "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."

As an avid reader, Ahmanson often explores literature beyond the Bible
for insight on his struggle to harness his inheritance. As Mrs. Ahmanson
told me, her family is captivated by J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the
Rings" trilogy -- by her count, her husband has read "The Hobbit" six
times. "Howard kind of identifies with Frodo," she said, referring to
the heroic Hobbit who must destroy a magical ring to save the world.

In my latest conversation with Mrs. Ahmanson, in which she spoke by
cellphone while strolling through an Orange County shopping mall on a
search for socks and underwear for her teenage son, David, we negotiated
my request for an interview with her husband. As she rattled off a
litany of engagements he had to make before leaving the following week
for a three-month tour of New Zealand, Japan and Australia, I heard a
man's voice in the background and realized Ahmanson was there all along.
"He'd talk on the phone but he doesn't want to. It just doesn't work
well," she explained regretfully, hinting at her husband's Tourette's.

Though Ahmanson himself declined to sit down for a face-to-face
interview, Roberta Ahmanson's interviews for this story were her first
since a two-part L.A. Times story in 1992 on her husband's role in the
Allied Business PAC. "They burned me so badly," she said of the Times.
"The reporter didn't know anything and wasn't going to be taught." Her
suspicion of the media was often apparent. While the premise for my
interview was to discuss her and her husband's involvement in the
Episcopal Church split, she bristled at the notion that they are
involved in any way other than granting money. "They officials] don't call us up and say, 'What do you want us to do?'" she
insisted.

Unlike other Ahmanson-funded campaigns, Mrs. Ahmanson has assumed a
personal role in the Episcopal Church split. She and her husband are
longtime members of St. James Church in Newport Beach, a leading parish
in the Episcopal Church's Los Angeles diocese where their "good friend"
and Anglican Council CEO David Anderson served as rector until this
year. (Anderson refused my interview request.) Mrs. Ahmanson, moreover,
is on the board of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, a right-wing
Washington think tank that shares ideas -- and an office in Washington
-- with the Anglican Council.

The institute is directed by Diane Knippers, an evangelical Episcopalian
and syndicated columnist who also happens to be a founding member of the
Anglican Council and its acting executive director. She is the chief
architect of the institute's Reforming America's Churches Project, which
aims <http://www.4religious-right.info/internal_document_Institute.html>
to "restructure the permanent governing structure" of "theologically
flawed" mainline churches like the Episcopal Church in order to
"discredit and diminish the Religious Left's influence." This has
translated into a three-pronged assault on mainline Presbyterian,
Methodist and Episcopal churches. With a staff of media-savvy research
specialists, the institute is able to ply both the religious and
mainstream media, exploiting divisive social issues within the churches.

"The larger framework for the challenge to the Episcopal Church is the
ongoing right-wing effort to get control of the mainline denominations,"
says Alfred Ross, president of the Institute for Democratic Studies, a
New York think tank that monitors anti-democratic political movements.
"As the right looks to consolidate different squares on the chessboard,
the mainline churches occupy key positions on that board."

The Institute for Religion and Democracy's project did not come together
until 2001, when Knippers and her husband were invited by the Ahmansons
for a five-week vacation in Turkey during which Mrs. Ahmanson says the
Knippers "inveigled me to go on the board." Ahmanson then
opened up his checkbook. IRS 990 forms show that, to go along with his
$1 million to the Anglican Council, he made five anonymous grants
totaling $460,000 to the institute in 2001, accounting for a 35 percent
spike in its fundraising from the previous year.

The campaign against the Episcopal Church climaxed on Aug. 5 last year,
just a day before the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson was scheduled to be
elected as the church's first openly gay bishop. In a column titled "The
Gay Bishop's Links,"
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/954kbxkw.asp>
Weekly Standard editor and Institute board member Fred Barnes alleged
that the Web site of a gay youth group Robinson founded contained links
to "a pornographic website." Further, Barnes alleged, Robinson "put his
hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting
"several years ago." The institute shopped the column to various cable
news networks but only Fox News broadcast it. Barnes did not return
calls seeking comment.

Though Barnes' smear was discredited by a panel of bishops investigating
the charges, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and
isolate it from its global affiliates. Since Robinson's Nov. 2
consecration, 13 dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Council have
threatened to break with the Episcopal Church and form a renegade
network. Though the network has yet to congeal, the momentum for a
full-blown split continues to build. And the Nigerian and Southeast
Asian churches, which, like the Episcopal Church, belong to the global
Anglican Communion, have broken off contact with the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church split is the best evidence yet that Ahmanson's plan
to bring America closer to resembling Calvin's elitist "church of the
elect," or what Rushdoony has called a "spiritual aristocracy," is
working. The split is also the crowning achievement of Ahmanson's nearly
30-year career in the business of radically transforming the country.
Though he still remains an unknown quantity to most Americans, he has
surpassed his father's accomplishments, and in the process, vanquished
-- or at least tamed -- his personal demons.

Reflecting on his prodigious achievements, Ahmanson has every reason to
be satisfied. "I may have had 'a plan to change American society' once,"
he mused. "Now I'm just trying to be faithful with what I have."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

[camero]

1. Biblical law based on the last 7 commandments

but leaving out the first 3. How convenient.

These people are not Christians at all. :eyes: