Free Republic

I missed this last week, but multimillionaire financier Howard Ahmanson, one of the biggest early funders of Proposition 8, has left the Republican Party and become a Democrat. Kathleen Pender of the Washington Post spoke with Ahmanson for a column. In a rare interview Thursday, Ahmanson shared some of his thoughts about why he switched parties. In a word, taxes. Specifically, he was offended by the California Republican Party's insistence during a recent state budget battle that there would be no tax increases for any reason, no matter what. "They're providing one issue, and it's just a very silly issue,"...

What drove evangelical multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson—the man behind Prop 8—away from the Republicans? It wasn't Sarah Palin. He talks to The Daily Beast’s Kathleen Parker. Multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson, one of the nation’s top evangelical Christian philanthropists and one of three funders of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, recently joined the Democratic Party. Although Ahmanson’s support for Prop 8 earned him critics on the left, his many philanthropic interests funded through his Fieldstead Institute are most often nonpartisan and nonpolitical, from AIDS prevention to public transportation. In an exclusive interview with columnist Kathleen Parker, he explains why he switched political...

Just as news breaks that political fundraising is down for both parties, Republicans have lost one of their more generous contributors. In what one might call a biblical move, Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson -- one of three major funders of the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages -- has abandoned the GOP for the Democratic Party. No one ever said the multimillionaire isn't idiosyncratic. In a rare interview Thursday, Ahmanson shared some of his thoughts about why he switched parties. In a word, taxes. Specifically, he was offended by the California Republican Party's insistence during a recent...

Lengthy...read more at the link. Wanted to post it because Jay Sekulow from the ACLJ made the list. The list includes Rick Warren(author of the Purpose Driven Life), Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, David Barton, Douglas Coe, Charles Colson, Luis Cortes, James Dobson, and many more.

Got Brain? By Donnel Jones, April 20, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms The New York Times hits a new low with coverage of an "experiment" that seeks to determine the activity of a person's brain and how that correlates to their being a Democrat or Republican. Science meets pseudo-science. We might as well have Dr. Mengele use his medical training to ascertain the essence of "Jewishness" using various "technologies." Of course, the researchers here are not sadistic half-man who torture children. Rather, they are wasting their patron's money (who is financing this nonsense, anyway?) with technologies that have proved invaluable in medical...

For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers'...

US millionaire bankrolls crusade against gay Anglican priests America's religious right draws a line in the sand as Anglican primates meet in London Jamie Doward Sunday October 12, 2003 The Observer Howard F. Ahmanson Jr does not like publicity. The fiftysomething multimillionaire, who lives in Newport Beach, California, is something of a recluse. Calls to Ahmanson's multitude of companies and foundations requesting an interview go unreturned. Organisations which enjoy his largesse decline to talk about their benefactor. What is known is that in the 1990s Ahmanson, whose family made a fortune in banking, subsidised a number of controversial right-wing causes....