POLITICAL AMAZON: CR Sugar-Daddies, Politics, and You

INTRODUCTION: As the GOP convention grinds on this week, Democrats and liberals are expressing their alarm at the extremist, religious-right bent of today's GOP.

Liberal pundits covering the convention and their guests--professional and "call-ins"-- bitterly deride the extremist nature of today's GOP and their beholding to the most extremist political, politicochristian, and corporate forces in America.

The warping process that produced today's extremist GOP did not happen overnight, and only part of it happened as a stealth movement. Much of it occurred right in plain site, documented largely in bits and pieces by the mainstream media, and exhaustively by well-respected, albeit less powerful and publicly known, political scientists.

However, for whatever reason, this "slouching-towards-Bethleham-to-be-born" direction of the GOP has been ignored by those who were in the position to have raised the alarm long before the GOP reached this crisis condition...much like Bush's systematic destruction of our country over the last 4 years has been ignored by those in Congress and America's mainstream media who were in the position to have raised the alarm long before we ended up with nearly 1000 American soldiers slaughtered at the Bush/Cheney Altar of Avarice and Greed in Iraq.

The GOP has undergone a convoluted morphing, and to try to grasp the intricacies of what has happened over the last 15 years is not going to be easy.

The politicians and pundits who have the power to bring this issue into the American public's consciousness are very busy folks these days, working 24/7 to deal with the continuing degradation of our country by president Bush and his supporters. They have little time to take on the responsibility of first learning about, and then talking about, the corporate-politicochristian process that has empowered Bush, and easily-bought politicians like him.

However, the initiation of the process MUST BE MADE RIGHT NOW, TODAY, if we are to have a ghost of a chance of taking back our country from the extremist rightwing.

We can no longer afford the luxury of passing up opportunities to expose the average American to the forces which have brought this destructive change to the GOP and America.

Extremist conservative power-brokers like Richard Viguerie were at the 2004 GOP Convention in NYCity, and Viguerie was actually interviewed by a liberal talk-show host. Yet, instead of using this opportunity to introduce listeners to the cause and process of the GOP change towards extremism, in which Viguerie plays a cornerstone role (he and Paul Weyrich were responsible for the creation of America's Unholy Trinity: politics-religion-corporate financing), Viguerie was given a free pass and Americans remained uninformed.

Did you know that during the GOP Convention in NYCity, the Council on National Policy --a very powerful, secretive group of rightwing financiers/ politicians/ religions nuts / corporate moguls-- met in NYCity?

That's right. Right under the noses of the Democratic Party politicians and liberal pundits bemoaning what was happening to the GOP and how they were destroying America, one of the groups responsible for this was meeting right under their noses--and not one of the politicians or pundits outed this meeting!

The takeover of the GOP by the extremist religious right started at least two decades ago. However, it was about 15 years ago that the serious funding of this effort began in California. First the local government positions were targeted; then county; then statewide and, before we knew it, the most extremist religious-right forces had taken over the California State Republican Party Platform.

The process was so successful that the method used has been instituted in other states.

It certainly was no big secret that this had occurred, and that it was spreading to other states. Those of us who had witnessed the process in California spent an absurd amount of effort--with practically zero results-- contacting politicians, the media, pundits, authors--anybody who might use their weight to get this issue before the American public before it was too late.

Finally, in 1996 (that's 6 years ago, when there was still ample time to start throwing up roadblocks to the movement), Mother Jones wrote "God's Vice Regents," which is about the most easily read article on this religious-right takeover.

There are dozens of well-researched websites, and several pristinely researched books, that deal with this extremist politicochristian movement.

Yet here we are, watching our country being destroyed by the political party and the president that this extremist politicochristian movement worked so hard to put into power.

Yet because our Democratic Party politicians and our liberal pundits--who had the power to bring this to light yet refused to do so--ignored this powerful extremist politicochristian movement, our country is tottering on the brink of being made into a Christian theocracy.

The Republican Party Platform in California has undergone significant changes over the last decade, thanks largely to gazillionaire (and Home Savings and Loan heir) Howard Ahmanson, Jr.

If you take the time to read up on one issue this year, this will be the most important one you could choose.

The articles on this webpage discuss the extremist religious-right's funding of America's rightwing politicians, focusing on California's Republican Party.

Although some of the articles focus on California, the information is vital to every American because the extremist religious right were so successful in California that they have taken their "program" of GOP State Party Platform takeover to other states--and one of them might be the one you live in.

The objective of this takeover is to rewrite our government laws (according to Old Testament/ Mosaic Law) to control every aspect of our life, including education, law, art, education, politics, and private moral issues.

These extremist Christians (Christian Reconstructionists and other fundamentalist nightmares) by stealth, took over the Republican Party platform in California, changing it to suit their extremist views; one of the changes they made is that now in California to receive funding and acknowledgement from the GOP, the candidate must not only oppose abortion rights but have nearly a life-long history of zealous adherence to this principle.

They have been BIG players in California for well over a decade, including in the recall of Governor Davis and backing selected candidates for his replacement.

You simply have to read the information to understand the enormity of both their impact on government controls on citizen morality AND the huge numbers of powerful Republican politicians who now do their bidding.

Although Christian Reconstructionist buying of rightwing politicians in America is a long-entrenched problem, there has been practically zero attention paid to it by America's mainstream media.

However, thanks largely to the internet, more Americans are becoming aware of the threat that Christian Reconstructionists pose to our nation and apparently even Republican constituents are protesting their buying of GOP politicians.

Indeed, lately the #1 extremist GOP funder in California, Howard Ahmanson Jr (Home S&L gazillionaire), and his wife have had some of their contributions returned by Republican politicians, and the Ahmansons are upset at being known for the policies they represent.

The Ahmansons have, in the past, been ultrasecretive about themselves, their donations and their politics. However, because of their donations now taking on the stench of extremist religious politics, they decided to now "go public" to try to spin the public's view of their actions.

As a vehicle they used the Orange County Register articles (text below) , which published a six-part series about the Ahmansons.

I am posting these articles on this webpage to ensure this information becomes more widely known.

In addition, I am posting the Mother Jones article from a few years ago which gives a more concise review of the Christian Reconstructionists' stealth activities --and success--in California.

The Orange County Register's suite of articles is extensive. However, once you read the Mother Jones article you will understand why it is so important that you set aside the time necessary to read the information, and take action to inform others.

The other articles on this page are a sampling of the information available about this issue, and include Ahmanson's funding of the Bush campaign, the Council on National Policy's links to Ahmanson's efforts, the extremist backers of this effort (some of whom believe gays should be executed and victims of AIDS be locked up in concentration camps), and the possibility that in 2006 California's Lt. Governor will be a hand-picked Ahmanson politician.

MotherJones.com / News / Feature

God's Vice-Regents
The religious right has conquered the Republican Party in California--now they're bringing the same game plan to your state.

Suzanne Herel
January 20 , 1998

A faction of right-wing Republicans who believe in governing by the Bible has already taken control of the California Republican Party. Now they're poised to duplicate that feat in 35 other states—and counting—under the banner of the new National Federation of Republican Assemblies. Their immediate goal: to cultivate a Reaganesque candidate who can win the presidency in 2000. Their long-term goal: an America ruled by the word of God.

The story begins a decade ago. Frustrated by the failure of Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential bid, some of his followers in Sacramento hatched a plan to take over the California Republican Party. First they packed the then-moderate California Republican Assembly (CRA), a mainstream caucus with a heavy hand in the state party's nominating process, with their Bible-minded colleagues. By 1990 they controlled the CRA, and since then the CRA's clout has helped the religious conservatives nominate and elect local candidates and—crucially—catapult true believers into state party leadership slots.

Ten years of dedication and planning later, the operation is a stunning success. Members of the Bible-waving CRA—which now bills itself as the "conservative conscience" of the state GOP—hold the top 13 elected spots in the party leadership, from state chair on down to second assistant secretary. In addition to the top posts, CRA members now make up roughly two-thirds of the California Republican Party's 1,700 voting members. That means they decide whom to nominate in the primaries—and whom to smear using their considerable resources of influence and money. Today every statewide GOP candidate courts CRA for its endorsement, including Attorney General Dan Lungren, who has already "interviewed" with CRA for his gubernatorial bid next year.

Nationwide in '98
But California was just the beginning. Flush with their success, the leaders of the CRA have exported their model of state party infiltration nationwide. In 1993 they helped set up a sister Arizona Republican Assembly, and last August they founded the new National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) to help coordinate affiliate groups in every state. The NFRA boasts the blessing of such right-wing shakers as Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, on its honorary advisory board, along with Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council and other conservative noteworthies.

Already 36 states have Republican Assemblies modeled on the CRA, and organizers expect conservative groups in the remaining 14 to organize their own affiliates by Easter. NFRA membership now stands at about 15,000, says NFRA president Stephen Frank, a former president of the CRA who advocates legislating by biblical principles.

"Give us another year and we'll triple that number," Frank says. "The important part here is that we have the ability not to sit at the table but to own the table. Who cares if you can eat if you can't set the menu? We want to set the menu." He adds, "We are the masters of government, not servants."

Says Frank: "Our goal is to organize grassroots support to win primaries for Constitutional conservatives, and elections for principled Republicans."

The NFRA's first move was to establish communication among religious-right groups. "What we have found is that there are conservative coffee clubs throughout other states, but each one in a community didn't realize there were others. We're creating a community of conservatives," Frank explains.

The NFRA plans an early August conference in Dallas, where it expects visits from likely GOP presidential contenders. Next year, it'll hold its first full-fledged national convention and endorse a candidate for president. Its motto: "United in '98; Victory in 2000."

As NFRA chief Frank criss-crosses the country recruiting new assembly affiliates, his travel and accomodations are paid for by the CRA's 2-year-old PAC, the Republican Victory Fund, which pumped nearly $70,000 into the campaigns of CRA-endorsed candidates in 1996. To keep the coffers filled, Frank urges members to sign up for Amerivision LifeLine phone service, a Working Assets-type service which donates 10 percent of a member's bill to conservative causes such as the Republican Victory Fund, Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, and more than 500 anti-abortion groups including Operation Rescue's ex-chief Randall Terry and various Right-to-Life chapters. Believers are also urged to use the Republican Victory Fund Visa card, which similarly kicks back a donation for each bill.

The NFRA game plan is grassroots politicking, CRA style: "We need to win council seats, school boards, statehouse races, assembly races, and Congress, and the cumulative will be winning the presidency," Frank says. "We're doing it the old-fashioned way: community by community."

Such cocksure talk might be easily dismissed if it weren't for CRA's proven success with just such a method in California. Dominating the GOP nomination process, CRA has racked up dozens of big primary victories, including that of U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) in 1992, and last week's special election primary victory of CRA member Tom Bordonaro for U.S. Congress over liberal Republican Brooks Firestone. CRA also claims credit for the winning ballot initiatives Prop. 187, which denied benefits to illegal immigrants, and Prop. 209, which dismantled affirmative action; and CRA now champions the English for Children initiative, which would end bilingual education, and the Payroll Protection for Unionized Workers initiative, which would abolish the automatic payroll checkoff for union dues.

Plan Ahead
From radical fringe to kingmakers in a decade — how did they do it? "Basically, there's two places you have influence: one is in the nominating process in the primaries, where you can elect people in ideological agreement with your views, and the other is in the party structure," says former CRA vice president John Stoos, a former gun lobbyist, member of the fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionist movement, and senior consultant to the State Assembly. "And who pays attention to this stuff? You literally have to plan months and years ahead to know where the openings are."

That's just what CRA did, patiently building their base below the political radar. Beginning in the early 1990s, they filled school boards, city councils, and Republican Party county central committees with like-minded religious, anti-abortion colleagues. Under the bylaws of the state party, these elected officials—and even nominees who lose in the general election—are allowed to appoint voting members of the state party.

The party entity called the county central committee was key to the CRA's technique, says Bob Larkin, a Simi Valley Republican who has battled the CRA conservatives for years. Before 1990, he says, it was hard to find people interested in running for these lowly local committee seats. Then conservative Republicans stepped in and filled them with their people. Seven years later, the CRA swept the party elections of February 1997, winning every elected seat on the state party board.

Larkin felt the wrath of the CRA when he ran for the California Assembly in 1996. In 1992 he had angered the CRA by launching a campaign to wrest control of the party's Ventura County Central Committee away from the conservatives. In reprisal, the CRA backed conservative Tom McClintock, who defeated Larkin in the 1996 primary and ultimately won the general election.

"They're organized and dedicated," says Larkin, "and mainstream Republicans are neither, so a very small group can take over."

To counter the conservative juggernaut, Larkin last fall formed the California Coalition of Responsible Republicans, a conference of moderate groups working to "restore some sanity to the California Republican Party."

God's Vice-Regents
While the CRA controls the state GOP, they don't yet control the statehouse. On the CRA's immediate agenda is putting a lock on the majority of the California State Assembly's 80 seats up for election this year. By a slight margin, Democrats won control in 1996. Republicans have a good shot at taking the Assembly back in the 1998 elections, and Stoos says the CRA has already identified 34 target seats for conservative Republicans.

What would CRA control mean for California?

The CRA's principles support the right to bear arms, strict interpretation of the Constitution, limited government, and "fair" trade and sovereignty. They condemn the separation of church and state, abortion, affirmative action, women in combat, and homosexuality. And members—even Frank, who is Jewish—advocate legislating by the Bible.

"Legislation should be biblical principles put into action," Frank says. Asked about the differing versions of the Bible used by various religions, he contended that every religion—even Buddhism—espouses a set of principles similar to the Ten Commandments.

Stoos, in an article for the Chalcedon Report, a journal of the radical Christian Reconstructionist movement, goes so far as to call Christian politicians God's "vice-regents...those who believe in the Lordship of Christ and the dominion mandate."

The "dominion mandate," Stoos told the MoJo Wire, "is that individuals are impacted by salvation. You will want to obey God's commandments, and to the extent you do that, you start being a better person. ...If there are enough of these groups in a community, the community is different. If government has a rule of law that is biblical justice, you will have freedom and liberty."

As proof of his theory, he points to the repeal in the 1970s of laws prohibiting homosexual sex acts—biblical offenses. "The proof is in the pudding," said Stoos. "Since we lifted those laws, we've had the biggest epidemic in history."

Chapter and Verse
Now the CRA's fundamentalist beliefs and savvy grassroots politics are putting on a serious road show.

One of the first states to buy in to the CRA model was Utah. Utah Republican Assembly president and co-founder Don Ruzicka, a Salt Lake area businessman, got interested after he and his wife Gayle, state president of the Eagle Forum, were talking with Schlafly.

Chartered in 1997, URA already has started making known its dissatisfaction with certain Republican lawmakers. "We have the grassroots strength to influence elections, and we are going to control as much of the process as we can and steer the party back to its roots," Ruzicka says.

In Pennsylvania, the conservative group Mainstream Republicans chartered the Pennsylvania Republican Assembly as its grassroots wing last August. Mainstream Republicans, an unofficial caucus of state committees, helped convince the party in 1994 to endorse staunch abortion opponent Rick Santorum, who beat out popular U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford.

Thanks to this pedigree, the PRA already has a strong showing in the state party. "We have the wherewithal on a real important vote to mobilize 50 percent of the state committee," says PRA chairman Ted Meehan. "When we want it to go one way and the leadership wants it another way, it's darn close."

Meehan's group, like its California counterpart, has spent years identifying like-minded Republicans and convincing them to join political committees and run for office. "We held receptions and tried to find out who the pro-life conservative people were, and we started to form a network," he says. "After the first reception we had identified maybe 15 or so. Five years down the road we're at about 81, better than a quarter of the state committee, including eight county chairmen."

In Florida, the assembly idea will be popular because people are dissatisfied with both political parties, says Rob Ross, general counsel for the new Florida Republican Assembly, chartered last month. "This is the last straw for a lot of Republicans. If this doesn't work, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to leave the party."

A House Divided
Some Republican critics say it's the CRA and its fundamentalist cousins that are scaring voters away from the party. Bob Larkin points out that in California, for example, only 11 percent of new voters last year registered as Republican, compared to 26 percent Democrat and 50 percent independent. "They are converting us to a third party," he says.

GOP critics also take issue with the Republican Assemblies' practice of campaigning against Republicans who don't support a strict conservative platform. Utah's Ruzicka doesn't deny this: "We're not afraid to come out against a Republican who is a Republican in Democrat's clothing."

In New Jersey, for example, the Christian Coalition sent out more than 1 million fliers against the re-election of pro-choice Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, Larkin says. CRA president John Courtney then sent a memo to U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich citing Whitman's narrow victory as proof that moderate Republican candidates just don't win. "Where I come from," Larkin says, "we call that treason, and people who do that traitors."

Love them or loathe them, the CRA and its 35 counterparts in the NFRA have their finger on the money. In politics, perception is reality, says Ruzicka. "You can wield a considerable amount of power if people think you have the power and you exercise it in some effective way. If we can organize and mold the conservatives across the U.S. into an effective lobby—and I see no reason why we can't—then we will be a political force that the Republican Party will have to reckon with."

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This copyrighted information has been posted as an information source only.

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.

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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 , 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 .

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 d

onation 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 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 , 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.

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. "[My father] 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 [Ahmanson] 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 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 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 , 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 [Anglican Council 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 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 [institute] 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," 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."

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About the writer Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Sound Off Send us a Letter to the Editor

This is the first in the Orange County Register series of articles on extremist Christian Howard Ahmanson Jr's stealth buying of GOP politicians, effecting tremendous impact on the government policy which deals with private citizen morality issues.

As Jerry Sloan (Project Tocsin) , a long-time California religious-right researcher, said: "It is obvious Howard is trying to change his image. As I told the reporter over two months ago, I have seen nothing in Ahmanson's actions or demeanor that says he is not out to accomplish what he said in a 1984 article that he wanted to use his fortune to see hat we 'had Biblical law integrated into our everyday lives.'"

After this series, I will add other information I have collected over the years about this issue. Read it all, do your own searches, ask your own questions, and then decide for yourself: "What am I going to do to stop this process of installing a Christian theocracy as America's government?"

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Sunday, August 8, 2004

#1: Burden of wealth

By PETER LARSEN
The Orange County Register

When you are Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., you give away money and you never
expect to see it again.

But then a $3,000 contribution to the Republican running for governor
of Hawaii returned to Ahmanson - with no explanation, just a brief note
of thanks but no thanks.

The reason for the rejection seemed perfectly clear to Ahmanson and his
wife, Roberta Green Ahmanson.

Most of the gifts from their private philanthropy generate little
notice. But a handful of groups and individuals they support have drawn dark
clouds of controversy around them.

So some - such as Linda Lingle, now governor of Hawaii - find it easier
to reject the money than risk being tainted by the Ahmanson name.

"We figured it had to be this," Howard Ahmanson says over breakfast,
referring to their public perception - or misperception as they see it.

His hunch was on the mark.

A group called Hawaii Citizens for Separation of State and Church had
protested Lingle's acceptance of Ahmanson's contribution, describing him
as a "Christian supremacist" who backed an Old Testament-style penalty
of death by stoning for homosexuals, adulterers and incorrigible
children.

"The views of the contributor were quite different from the views of
the campaign," says Bob Awana, Lingle's chief of staff. "We just thought
in the heat of battle, getting ready for an election only 10 days out,
it could have turned into a lightning rod - and we didn't want it to."

The return of the Lingle check in late 2002 sounded an alarm for the
Ahmansons. As their names surfaced again and again - linked to hot-button
issues from opposing gay clergy in the Episcopal Church to science
texts challenging Darwin's theory of evolution - the alarms grew louder.

"When a politician sends money back, it's serious," Roberta Ahmanson
says.

The Ahmansons came to believe they had an image problem, which they
blame on the distortion, intentional or not, of their views by others.

They also came to believe that they held some responsibility to explain
themselves and their beliefs, so that people might understand them and
their work, which they see as a calling to do good in the world.

"It brought home that having our name attached to things could harm
causes that we care for, because we hadn't talked to the press and hadn't
made ourselves vulnerable," Roberta Ahmanson said.

"It didn't seem fair to me," she said. "Because then we couldn't give
to anything anymore. Because then we'd be tarred with this vision of who
we are that is false."

So Howard Ahmanson, the Home Savings and Loan heir whose zeal for
privacy had left him a shadowy figure in the minds of many, and Roberta
Ahmanson, a small-town Iowa girl who grew up to be a religion reporter,
decided to start talking.

Born into Riches

Howard Ahmanson Jr. arrived in this world Feb. 3, 1950, to parents who
had been married 17 childless years.

His father, Howard Ahmanson Sr., was 44, and had spent those years
building his Home Savings and Loan empire into the nation's largest.

His mother, Dorothy, was 42 and settled into her role as wife of a
business magnate, dividing her time between estates in Hancock Park in Los
Angeles and Harbor Island in Newport Beach.

The telegram Howard Ahmanson Sr. sent in the voice of his newborn son
hints at the excitement he felt at the birth:

"Just wanted you to know I arrived in town this morning in fine shape.
Weigh in at 7 pounds 9 ounces. Mother feels wonderful and glamorous as
ever. Suggest however you avoid the old man. He is slightly
psychopathic."

The boy looked to have won the birth-lottery jackpot: the only child of
a fabulously wealthy couple. Yet Howard Ahmanson Jr. remembers a
childhood of distance and difference, one that offered him everything he
could want but often little of what he needed.

He remembers guilt for the wealth that surrounded and smothered him. He
remembers the crushing disappointment he felt when his parents divorced
as he turned 10.

And always, his social awkwardness, odd mannerisms and the awareness of
being somehow different, which four decades later finally would be
diagnosed as Tourette's syndrome - a neurological disorder of physical and
verbal tics, often coupled with conditions such as obsessive-compulsive
disorder.

His consciousness of the family fortune - the privately held Home
Savings had assets of $2.5 billion when his father died in 1968 - emerged
around age 7.

"I went through a false religious conversion at the time a little bit
of awareness of what Jesus had to say about money and being aware that I
was greedy and enjoyed my toys," he says.

Concerned that God might be keeping a scorecard on which the rich get
black marks, Ahmanson tried to eliminate the evidence from his bedroom
in Harbor Island. Already bookish, he carted his library to an adjacent
room.

"I tried to move into denial," he says. "I thought maybe I should
abstain from them or not look at them."

He also grew to resent the servants who took care of his every need. At
summer camp on Santa Catalina Island he was chagrined to learn he
didn't know how to fold his clothes. His short stint as a Cub Scout fizzled,
partly because he lacked the basics to earn his badges.

"My view of those people is they had a vested interest in my not
learning any skills," Ahmanson says.

Often alone in a sprawling mansion with only the servants, Ahmanson
spent hours with the books he had temporarily abandoned.

All his reading and a natural intelligence helped him speed through
school - finishing second through fifth grades in just two years at the
now closed St. James Day School in Newport Beach. Yet as he soared
academically, he struggled emotionally to keep up with his older classmates.

At Lincoln Junior High in Newport Beach, kids quickly noticed three
traits that have helped define Ahmanson throughout his life: he was very
rich, he was very smart, and he was very different.

At first, the servants sent him to school in a limousine, dressed in a
suit, carrying a briefcase. It embarrassed him deeply, Ahmanson says.

A plea to his father resulted in a discreet arrival around the corner
from school. Hiding his intelligence and his behavioral differences was
harder.

In English class once, he was reading a book tucked inside his
textbook, recalls Michael Ray, a classmate at Lincoln and later at Occidental
College.

"The teacher grabbed it from him and said, 'Aha! You're cheating!' And
it turned out to be Shakespeare."

Ahmanson had tics and twitches and other personality quirks, and at
Lincoln they started to worsen.

"When I was under stress, I'd try to stop myself from having fits - I'd
bite my finger and my hand. But it only became part of (the fit)."

At 13, Ahmanson moved from his mother's home on Harbor Island to his
father's in Hancock Park, "to "see if I'd pick up some machismo from him
- I did not," he said.

He enrolled in the Black-Foxe Military Institute, a private school in
Hancock Park where the rich and famous often sent their sons.

"I didn't enjoy it when they got really picky, but there was something
Tourettean-ly ritualistic about marching around that was not
displeasing to me," Ahmanson said.

Scott Allen met Ahmanson when both were 13-year-olds at Black-Foxe, and
soon they were best friends.

Allen remembers the kids being tough on Howard: "He absorbed it; he
kept bouncing back. I saw him irritated a couple of times, but I don't
think he has a mean bone in his body."

Allen says he always thought he and his pal were academic equals, until
the SAT scores came back and Ahmanson left him in the dust.

"I'm in shock," Allen remembers. "I say, 'Howard, how could you score a
798 verbal and, oh, a 685 math?' And his reply instantly is, 'Well, I
guess I just had a bad day in math.'

"Absolutely no mercy. I thought, 'This guy is great.'"

a misdiagnosed illness

Ahmanson's relationship with his father was always difficult. With his
mother, life was easier, though often at a distance.

Dorothy Ahmanson got the house on Harbor Island in the divorce, and as
a teenager, Ahmanson spent every other weekend there. She remarried -
the Dorothy Grannis Sullivan University Club at the University of
California, Irvine, is named for her. And according to her son, she struggled
with alcohol and prescription-drug abuse off and on throughout her
life.

His father - whom the New York Times once profiled as "one of the least
known but wealthiest financial magnates" in the nation - hobnobbed with
the rich and powerful, raced yachts and collected art. Yet when it came
to his only child, he struggled as father to a bookish introvert who
resented his parents' divorce and the gulf between him and them.

But in spring 1968, at the end of his freshman year at Occidental
College, Ahmanson says, his father indicated in a phone call that he was
willing to work on the unspoken problems between them.

"He said, which was way hard for him to admit, 'We've been growing
apart,'" Ahmanson says. "I think he was willing to admit that he made me
nervous, that there was something I disliked about him. And he had never
been willing to admit that before.

"It didn't change much, but it just gave me a crack - maybe he was
going to try. Maybe there was something worth the risk.

"And then he died."

Howard Ahmanson Jr. was with his father and stepmother, traveling in
Belgium, when his father suffered a fatal heart attack. In the shock of
that moment, Ahmanson says, he felt mostly relief.

"If anything, it was kind of like someone who's diving way below sea
level suddenly being brought up to sea level," he said. "The pressure was
taken off."

Home alone in a 14,000- square-foot mansion in Hancock Park, the
18-year-old heir tried to find a routine.

He got a low-level job at the Beverly Hills branch of his father's
savings and loan empire and drove himself there every day. But some in his
family - one cousin, in particular - felt his behavior was alarming,
and sent Ahmanson to see a psychiatrist at the University of California,
Los Angeles.

In the past, Ahmanson has acknowledged needing therapy after his
father's death. Now, he says he wants to tell the whole story in hopes it
will be healing - that he was "misdiagnosed as schizophrenic" and sent for
two years to a Kansas mental institution.

As he sat in the office of the UCLA doctor, talking about himself in
the summer of 1968, Ahmanson says he didn't grasp why he was there.

"I don't know what they thought," he says of his cousin and the doctor
who committed him. "I was not contemplating suicide at the time, I can
tell you. I had no thought of suicide or self-mutilation. I have had at
various points in my life, but at that time I was not experiencing any
such thoughts.

"I was having problems, but I was functioning the day before I went in.
As far as I'd had any symptoms or behaviors, I'd always had them."

Even after arriving at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, he thought he
was only going to continue his therapy.

"I thought it was some kind of dorm where I could spend more time,"
Ahmanson says of the campus-like clinic founded by Karl Menninger,
considered the father of American psychotherapy.

But then a clinic worker asked for his wallet - and refused to give it
back.

"I knew they would use force to keep me from leaving," he says. "You
asked if it was voluntary? If Mary, Queen of Scots, went voluntarily to
England, so I went voluntarily."

For 18 months he lived at the clinic, considered at the time to be "the
Mayo Clinic for the mind," a place the rich and famous send their
problem children, Ahmanson said.

"If I was there now, I'd organize an inherited-wealth group."

Though some patients were treated with drugs, Ahmanson says, he
received psychotherapy. In time, he was allowed occasional trips home for
holidays, community college courses in Topeka and a part-time job there as
a dishwasher at a Ramada Inn.

After two years of treatment, the last six months in a family care
home, Ahmanson was released, he said.

Only a year or so later did he get a better idea of what the doctors
thought. In a letter from a Menninger official to the draft board,
Ahmanson read their pronouncement: "Schizophrenic reaction, the prognosis is
not good."

Howard Ahmanson returned to Los Angeles, perhaps the richest
20-year-old in town, yet almost completely in the dark about his wealth.

finding god

He moved in with his cousin, Bob Ahmanson, resumed his studies at
Occidental, and lived on whatever money was provided him by his cousins -
or, upon turning 21, his trust. He ignored relatives' attempts to explain
how he could access his money.

"I would rather have wanted to be able to say I was not rich and be
telling in some sense the truth," he says, declining to provide any
details of his inheritance or wealth. "I wanted to think that I did not have
access to it."

At Occidental, as he completed a degree in economics, he also played
rugby - "I could barely run fast enough, but they kind of valued my
spirit" - joined the Order of the Mystic Apes fraternity, and taught himself
how to ride a bicycle.

After graduation in 1972 and eight months kicking around Europe, the
onset of near-crippling arthritis sent him back to Los Angeles to seek
treatment.

"I was using a cane at 23; my life was over," he said. "I was willing
to consider new options."

One choice he embraced was an invitation by some friends from
Occidental to tag along to services at Lake Avenue Congregational Church in
Pasadena.

"I had always believed in God," Ahmanson said. "But I didn't have a
clear definition as to what he was or what he wanted."

As a child, he went to Sunday services with his parents, though he
believes they were there more because of tradition than religious
conviction: "My mother's beliefs were closer to New Age, and my father's beliefs
were closer to old liberal - and neither of them were Christians as I
would define the term today."

At Lake Avenue, he listened to the sermons, studied Christian books and
made up his mind while on a church retreat at Lake Arrowhead.

"I decided I would at least believe or act as if I believe that Jesus
Christ was Lord and had died and risen from the dead," he said.

discovering his mission

In the 1970s, his interest in linguistics and religion took him to
Texas, where he applied, unsuccessfully, to be a Bible translator and
earned a master's degree in linguistics at the University of Texas at
Arlington.

Despite his inheritance, he lived modestly - for many years he resided
in an Irvine condo on a monthly stipend of $1,200, wearing used flannel
shirts. He drove an old Datsun pickup truck with a foam pad in the back
to sleep on. When he traveled, he flew coach and stayed in run-down
hotels.

His quest to learn more about religion led him to a greater acceptance
of his wealth and a desire to use it to do good.

The writings of C.S. Lewis satisfied a need to reconcile his intellect
with his faith - "He seemed to be a Christian with intelligence who
connected his spirit with his mind, which evangelicals sometimes have
trouble doing," Ahmanson said.

For years, the books of the Rev. R. J. Rushdoony provided a cornerstone
to his religious education. But his support of Rushdoony - whose
writings on subjects such as homosexuality, race and law are controversial -
would become a millstone around his reputation.

Ahmanson immersed himself in Christianity, "this whole new
multidimensional world that I had to explore."

In 1978 - the year he cast a ballot for California Democrat Gov. Jerry
Brown - his interest in politics was piqued by a bitter fight over the
fate of the Orange County Rescue Mission, which was being squeezed out
of Santa Ana by a redevelopment project.

One night he decided to pay a visit to the mission, unannounced, even
though its director, Rob Martin, had been told Ahmanson might stop by
one day.

"I expected that with the name Ahmanson, which has a lot of cachet in
this state, that a secretary would call me and set something up," Martin
said.

But Ahmanson parked around the corner from the Second Street mission
and entered without anyone noticing.

"He came in and sat in the audience like he was a homeless guy," Martin
said. "Went through the mission, ate the meal, and when we were
assigning beds and getting guys showers, he came over and announced himself to
me.

"You can imagine my surprise."

The millionaire listened to the social worker, finding himself more and
more outraged at the idea that redevelopment helped the "haves" at the
expense of the "have nots."

"If the presence of the poor and the organizations that serve them is
inherently a blight upon the community, I think you can tell where that
goes," Ahmanson says. "It excludes them."

Ahmanson gave money to the mission to help in the legal battle against
the city, and when the mission moved to a new location he donated more
through the years.

His involvement with the mission increased his interest in politics.

"His father was known as Emperor Ahmanson in the '50s and '60s and
really used to snap heads when he'd walk down hallways," Martin says. "So
little Howard saw a lot of politicians come hat in hand to his dad."

But where his father approached politics from the practical point of
view - working the system to protect or improve his business interests -
"Howard came at politics from a philosophical point of view," Martin
said.

"I know they call him the angel of the religious right and all that
stuff," he said. "But when he comes at issues, he's coming from a
heartfelt belief that free markets and other things like that serve the poor.

"It's not a feint - 'Let me enjoy my freedom and not pay taxes.' His
heartbeat was with the poor."

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www.ocregister.com/ocr/2004/08/08/sections/news/focus_in_depth/article_193470.php

Sunday, August 8, 2004

#2 'The world is your oyster'

The early building blocks of Howard Ahmanson Sr.?s success were not
financial riches, but a solid and loving family.

The fortune of philanthropist Howard F. Ahmanson Jr. was built by his
father, a Los Angeles businessman.

According to the Ahmanson Foundation annual report for 2002, Howard
Fieldstead Ahmanson Sr. was born in Omaha, Neb., in 1906. By all accounts,
the early building blocks of his success were not financial riches, but
a solid and loving family. His father, an insurance man, was reported
to have told him nightly, "The world is your oyster." This sense of
personal affirmation, of the importance of confidence and belief in
possibilities became a hallmark of the man, in both his business and personal
relations.

After the sudden death of his father in 1925, Ahmanson Sr. moved with
his mother to Los Angeles. Within two years, he graduated with an
economics degree from the University of Southern California. Before
graduating he began selling insurance; H.F. Ahmanson Company quickly became the
largest fire underwriter in California.

On the eve of the Great Depression, he innovated an idea that would
become an industry staple - fire insurance for property under foreclosure.
Ahmanson was reported to have said the depression made him feel "like
an undertaker."

"The worse things got, the better they got for me," he told the New
York Times.

He married Dorothy Grannis, a student at the University of California,
Los Angeles, and in 1943 bought the controlling share in his father's
insurance company. During World War II, he and his wife moved to
Washington, D.C., where he served as chief expediter for the Aircraft Products
Division at the Pentagon for the Navy. By 1945 they moved back to Los
Angeles.

In 1947, inspired by the prosperity of mid-century Los Angeles, he put
together a merger that eventually became Home Savings and Loan
Association. The family business financed houses by the thousands through
construction loans on tracts and mortgages on homes and apartments. The
company also had a real estate arm, developing Baldwin Hills and
Laurelwood. Home Savings and Loan became the largest enterprise of its kind in
America.

In addition, he held the Ahmanson Bank and Trust Company, the National
American Insurance Company of Omaha, and the Southern Counties Title
Insurance Company of Los Angeles.

In 1950 his son, Howard Jr., was born. In 1952, Howard F. and Dorothy
Ahmanson established the Ahmanson Foundation, focusing in the early
years on grants to medical, cultural, human service and education in Los
Angeles. Howard Ahmanson Sr. assumed leadership of the foundation in 1961
and awarded major gifts to the Los Angeles Music Center, biological
research at USC, and the California Museum of Science and Industry.

He served on the Board of Governors of the Los Angeles County Art
Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) and founded Otis Art
Associates. He served as trustee at USC, the California Museum Foundation, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Performing Arts Council of the
Music Center and was appointed by President Kennedy as a trustee of the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

He suffered a fatal heart attack on June 18, 1968, while traveling with
his son and his second wife, Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson. By 1972, the
Ahmanson Foundation began to receive the designated proceeds of his
estate, along with additional contributions from his nephews, William H.
Ahmanson and Robert H. Ahmanson, and his first wife, Dorothy Grannis
Sullivan, increasing the foundation's grant-making. By 2002, the foundation
had given more than 12,000 grants totaling about $555 million.

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Tuesday, August 10, 2004

#3: The strength of their conviction

The Ahmansons' clout doesn't sit well with people who disagree with them.

By PETER LARSEN

The Orange County Register

Part 3

Type "Howard Ahmanson" into any Internet search engine and the portrait of the man that emerges on your screen might seem alarming.
He's an "avenging angel of the religious right" who wants to keep gays from marrying or serving as ministers, and maybe apply the death penalty to them, too.

He's a "soul brother of the Taliban," scheming to use his electronic-voting-machine company to steal elections for Christian conservatives.
He's a "right-wing theocrat," a sugar daddy for creationists trying to squeeze God in alongside Darwin in public-school science classes.
In cyberspace, the most controversial corners of life tend to float to the top, which can make it hard to know what to believe when it comes to Ahmanson, his wife Roberta Ahmanson, and Fieldstead & Co., their private philanthropy.

Further muddying the water is that most of what gets posted on the Internet contains some measure - large or small - of the truth. A little digging makes things a bit clearer.

Ahmanson makes no bones about his conviction that homosexuals should not marry or serve as clergy. But he says he does not believe in stoning them.

He has contributed millions of dollars to campaigns for candidates and causes he considers socially conservative. But he has never owned any part of a voting- machine company - two cousins owned part of one in the mid-'80s, creating the confusion.

The Ahmansons spend lots of money to promote the view that Darwin's theory of evolution doesn't mean God didn't also have a hand in creating the universe. But they don't believe the whole job got done in seven days, the literal biblical interpretation some creationists advocate.

Even so, their strong opinions and deep pockets make many who disagree with them uneasy about the Ahmansons' ability to influence things.

The Ahmansons point out that many people share their views on various hot-button subjects, but it's also true that not very many can write a check with lots of zeroes to advance their causes.
"Money talks," said Frederick Clarkson, a Massachusetts writer who makes several mentions of Howard Ahmanson in his recent book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy."

"To the degree that there is a threat to constitutional democracy in the long run, and the erosion of religious freedom in the short run, Ahmanson owns a lot of responsibility for that."
Fundamental laws

The Chalcedon Foundation and its founder, the late Rev. R. J. Rushdoony - will likely remain the albatross around the Ahmansons' reputation, no matter how many humanitarian projects or art shows they sponsor.

A prolific writer, Rushdoony advocated ideas seen as extreme by many. "The Institutes of Biblical Law" is the one most often singled out for criticism and censure. In it, Rushdoony talks of the need to return to biblical law, using such examples as the death penalty by stoning for homosexuals and adulterers.

Howard Ahmanson first read Rushdoony in the 1970s, eventually served on the board of his foundation's board and donated more than $700,000, he says.

In a 1985 interview with the Register, Ahmanson described his goal as "total integration of biblical law into our lives," a statement that has clung to him ever since.

To those like Clarkson who believe in a stout wall between church and state, Rushdoony's ideas and the Ahmansons' cash stand as a threat to democracy: If biblical law is the law of the land, what place is there for people with other beliefs?

"It was his money that made it possible for Rushdoony to do as much as he did in his lifetime," Clarkson said. "Theocracy is the antithesis of democracy."

The Ahmansons say their views are misunderstood.

They do not want a theocracy to replace democracy in the United States, they say. And they don't want to make all Ten Commandments or all the biblical "case laws" the law of the land.

Yet at times, the way they explain their views - the fine lines they draw, the hypotheticals they consider - can leave questions about just where they stand.

For instance, Roberta Ahmanson says she believes the story about Jesus stopping a mob from stoning an adulterous woman changed the Bible's take on punishment from death to forgiveness for such acts as adultery.

Howard Ahmanson says he also doesn't think stoning is the answer, yet he stops just short of condemning the idea.

"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," he said. "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," Ahmanson said. "But I don't think it's at all a necessity."

Rushdoony and Chalcedon's views on homosexuals have also made the Ahmansons subjects of fear and suspicion.

"When you read R. J. Rushdoony, that's quite alarming," said Jerry Sloan, a Sacramento activist who, as a gay atheist, has many concerns about Rushdoony and Ahmanson. "Under any form of government, there's only room for godly families and everybody else is out. Or dead."
In the early 1980s, Sloan formed a watchdog group called Project Tocsin, to track what he describes as California's religious right. He quickly focused on Ahmanson's political donations.

"Any progress gays had made up to that time would have been wiped out," he said. "I'm concerned about my rights as a gay person, my rights just to live."

Social conservatives

What Ahmanson says he mostly sought in political candidates was social conservatism - opposition to abortion was near the top of the list - combined with economic and regulatory views that emphasized free markets and personal liberty.

By the early 1990s, his interest in reshaping the political landscape led him to join with four other well-to-do conservatives to form the Allied Business Political Action Committee.

The committee - and its successor, the California Independent Business PAC - also caused concerns for Democrats, as Ahmanson and his friends spent more than $4 million from 1991 to 1996 on campaigns, enough to help Republicans gain control of the Assembly for a brief period.

In 1994, after Allied candidates won 18 of the 19 seats that the committee targeted in the Assembly and three of four in the Senate, a Democratic Senate Caucus staffer warned, "The results were awesome."
Ahmanson, on his own, gave money to a group called the Education Alliance, which successfully backed social conservatives for local school boards.

Eventually, though, the political action subsided. Many elected with Ahmanson's help lost re-election bids or, in the much-publicized case of the Orange Unified school board, were recalled - despite Ahmanson giving $20,000 to help keep them in office. (He gave about 20 percent of that raised to fight the recall; teacher unions gave about two-thirds of the funds for it.)

"It was very scary," said Jim Toledano, Orange County Democratic Party chairman in the 1990s. "Knowing how hard it was to raise the bucks, to have people who could sit down and write a check that was equal to what you might raise in six months, that was scary.
"You can buy a lot of hate for the kind of money they had available and were willing to spend," said Toledano, who headed the county campaign against Proposition 22, the anti-gay marriage initiative that passed in 2000. "I don't know him, but my understanding is that he's one of these people who's very deeply committed to his beliefs, and puts his money where his faith is."

And that's not uncommon for the wealthy and politically active, says Toledano, who is gay. Whether it's Ahmanson giving to Republicans or billionaire George Soros giving to Democrats, people have the right to give their money to anyone they like.

"As a general principle, it's hard to argue with," he said. "But fundamentally, no one should have that kind of power."
The Gay Debate

When the U.S. Episcopal Church met last year to confirm an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire, the main groups fighting against it had close Ahmanson ties.

For several days before the vote, officials from the American Anglican Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy - both of which have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Ahmansons - were fixtures on TV or in newspaper articles, arguing against a vote for Bishop Gene Robinson.

American Anglican Council is run by their former Newport Beach priest, and Roberta Ahmanson is on the Institute on Religion and Democracy board.

The Ahmansons' opposition to gay clergy - combined with the support of Rushdoony and the $310,000 given to California's anti-gay initiative - have made them unpopular in the gay community.

Their opinions on homosexuality are formed by passages in the Bible that speak against it, they say. Of the two, Howard Ahmanson holds the stronger views, seeing homosexuality as an illness akin to alcoholism, which treatment might cure.

His beliefs are outside those held by mainstream psychiatry, though. The American Psychiatric Association in 1973 ruled that homosexuality is not an illness, and since then has said there is no scientific evidence to back those who claim to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals.

Roberta Ahmanson said that while she believes homosexuality is wrong, "if people in this society want to have homosexual relationships and they think that's the best thing for them to do, they have to be free to do that in a pluralistic society.
"You treat everybody like a human being," she said, noting that same-sex unions have been held at the hotel she and her husband restored in her Iowa hometown.

"What I told our hotel manager, who's a devout Roman Catholic, who was disturbed by this, I said: 'Look, this is your opportunity to show the love of Jesus to these people.' "

Others disagree with the Ahmansons' interpretation. At the Pacific School of Religion - the same Berkeley seminary Rushdoony graduated from in 1944 - professor Mary Tolbert says the Bible verses that speak against homosexuality should be viewed in the context of the times in which they were written.

"One hundred and fifty years ago, the big argument was over the Bible supporting slavery, and it does support slavery," said Tolbert, director of the seminary's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. "And yet we are now able to say that the biblical world view (on slavery) is wrong."

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Wednesday, August 11, 2004

#4: Making an art of giving

The Ahmansons, through their donations, are on a mission to teach history and promote the arts.

By PETER LARSEN

The Orange County Register

Perry, Iowa

Take a walk down Willis Avenue in this small Midwestern town and it's hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about Roberta or Howard Ahmanson - $20 million buys a lot of good will in a railroad town where the trains no longer run.

"Perry was one of the saddest towns in four counties," said Liz Garst, a prominent Iowa Democrat and ACLU activist, remembering how things were before the Ahmansons bought and restored a handful of historic buildings.

"And Roberta Ahmanson is the good thing that has happened to them," Garst said.

While people in Perry give thanks to the hometown girl who married a California millionaire and never forgot her roots, in other communities, the money handed out by the couple sometimes is seen in a different light.

In Ohio and Texas, if the Ahmansons are known, it's probably as the money behind a push to place God alongside Darwin in science textbooks.

In U.S. Episcopal churches, their funding has helped fight the ordination of gay and lesbian clergy.

In political circles in many parts of the nation, their support for a theology known as Christian Reconstruction has created suspicion about their goals for government.

The Ahmansons don't shy from talking about the groups and ideas they back despite sometimes heavy criticism. They have strong beliefs and the cash to support them.

But they bristle at the idea their work is defined by its most controversial corners, while their benevolent projects in the middle ground are largely ignored.

SAVING PERRY

Roberta and Howard Ahmanson see plenty to cherish in the way things used to be, often finding in tradition a map for modern times.
So, as they consider projects, their interests often pull them toward work that embraces a classical set of values.

It might be religion; they define themselves as orthodox Christians.
It might be art; they'll soon sponsor a show in England of the works of the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio.

For Roberta Ahmanson, it's certainly her hometown.

Despite growing up with a sense of not fitting in with her peers in Perry, today she talks of her hometown in golden-hued tones of admiration for its people and respect for the values it represents.
So, when buildings that were important to her as a child became available, she bought them.

The Hotel Pattee was first. When it went on the market in 1993, Ahmanson bought it for $38,000, and the dilapidated building was gutted and reborn as a handcrafted tribute to the people of Perry.
But the hotel was just the beginning of what Roberta Ahmanson would eventually build here over 10 years and $20 million. The project evolved into a living museum - Hometown Perry, Iowa - to celebrate the way a Midwestern town used to be and how it grew and changed.
The hotel and a museum in the Carnegie Library preserve the past but also reflect the future.

"It's like walking into a small-town photo album and looking at the stories of the people," said Bill Clark, president of the project, which has collected more than 7,000 photographs and nearly 10,000 oral histories.

"There are stories of work and family and faith," he said. "Education. And, of course, loss. We lost 100 families when the railroad closed in 1977."

The town was settled by German, Irish and Swedish immigrants who farmed the fertile soil and later worked on the Milwaukee Road railroad. In the past 10 years, immigrants from Mexico and Central America have arrived - Latinos now are 30 percent of the population - and the museum will work to link their lives and stories.

"One of the things I'm proud of about Perry is that the project takes seriously the lives of everyday men and women, who are the backbone of any society," Roberta Ahmanson said. "Any society is only as good as those human beings."

FUNDING THE FINE ARTS

When she was 12, Roberta Ahmanson traveled by train to Washington, D.C., to visit her aunt and uncle - and the National Gallery of Art.
Around the same time, Howard Ahmanson developed a love of classical music through visits to his school by musicians provided by the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

The arts remain a passion for them and get a nice slice of their giving most years.

Roberta Ahmanson bought dozens of works for the Hotel Pattee - from the paintings and murals that cover its walls to the sculptures on the rooftops.

The couple sponsored a seven-month exhibit that wrapped up Saturday at Iowa State University's Brunnier Art Museum - "Grant Wood's Main Street," the first-ever showing of nine illustrations Wood drew for an edition of Sinclair Lewis' novel "Main Street."

Next year, the Caravaggio show debuts at the National Gallery in London.

In Orange County, Howard Ahmanson is the spotlight-shy sponsor of the Pacific Symphony's Frieda Belinfante Class Act program, which provides 40 elementary schools with a symphony musician-in-residence for a year and several concerts.

Belinfante, a Dutch Resistance fighter in World War II who was part Jewish and a lesbian, was the first conductor of the Orange County Philharmonic Society and the music educator who brought classical music into Ahmanson's boyhood classroom.

From those first seven schools, the program grew to 20 and then to 40, thanks in large part to the Ahmansons' initial pledge of $500,000 over five years, said Sue Totten, vice president of the Pacific Symphony. They later added three years and $300,000 to the pledge.
"We said, 'We'd like to honor you by naming this for you,' " Totten said of the orchestra's offer to Howard Ahmanson. "And he said, 'No, I think it would be more appropriate to name it for Frieda Belinfante,' which everyone thought was a wonderful idea."

DIFFERENCES ASIDE

Not long after University of Southern California religion professor Donald Miller published a history of the Armenian genocide, a former student - who works for the Ahmansons - called with a tip that they wanted to fund a project in that country.

Miller sent a proposal and quickly got an unusual answer - an invitation to spend more of their money if he wanted to add photography to the project.