Posted on 09/12/2014 8:25:39 AM PDT by San Francisco native
Gay rights money funds archbishop’s critics Faithful America part of national progressive advocacy network
September 10th, 2014
Many Catholics in the San Francisco Bay Area were surprised by the strong negative reaction to Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone’s decision to give a talk about traditional marriage at a June 19 Washington, D.C., rally organized to support marriage.
A national online petition from Faithful America and a nationally publicized June 10 letter from 78 politicians and others urged the archbishop to withdraw from the March for Marriage in Washington, D.C. The letter and petition citing “hate” speech by the National Organization for Marriage and the labeling participant Family Research Council as a “hate group” created a media storm and disturbed many local Catholics and pastors.
Most are used to attacks on the archbishop for his strong advocacy of the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and family, but the reaction seemed disproportionate to the event – which was a talk at a rally by a Catholic Church leader who has given many talks in support of marriage and family across the country and in the media.
The cause for surprise among Catholics may be they assumed the powerful reaction was spontaneous. Now there is abundant evidence the reaction was both well planned and financed by Faithful America, an organization that is supported directly and indirectly by politically powerful and wealthy men and by grant-making foundations who have devoted millions of dollars to promoting acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) behavior.
In this three-part series, Catholic San Francisco will analyze Faithful America, the funding of groups that call themselves Catholic or faith-based and attack Catholic leaders and teaching, and the concept of “hate groups” and “hate speech.” The first part of the series, published here, focuses on Faithful America. The second will focus specifically on the tactic of funding organizations which use the language of faith to attack Catholic teaching. The third part of the series will address the “hate” tactic by opponents of Catholic teaching on human sexuality.
Faithful America Faithful America, which organized the letter from political leaders including California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, and an online petition, describes itself as a grass-roots citizens’ organization.
However, Faithful America exists almost entirely online and counts its members by those who sign its online petitions.
It has received funding from the nation’s two top gay political philanthropists, the founder of software publisher Quark Inc. Colorado’s Tim Gill and Michigan medical technology company heir, billionaire Jon Stryker. Both men’s foundations, the Gill Foundation and the Arcus Foundation, were created primarily to promote acceptance of homosexuality. Both men have also contributed millions to candidates and organizations who advocate homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
Faithful America has also received significant funding from progressive philanthropist George Soros, via his foundations. In addition, it received funding from the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund, a San Francisco-based foundation that lists acceptance of homosexuality as one of the tenets of its mission statement.
Faithful America, whose website states it is “dedicated to reclaiming Christianity from the religious right,” has launched more than 30 online national petition drives since 2013. The campaign directed at Archbishop Cordileone was one of more than a dozen online Faithful America petitions that collected signatures from a nationwide base to criticize individual local U.S. bishops, Catholic pastors or Catholic schools, most around issues related to homosexuality.
What happened in San Francisco In San Francisco on June 17, about 75 people marched to the archdiocesan offices to present Faithful America’s petition, while the executive director of Faithful America emailed a letter to Archbishop Cordileone signed by 78 politicians and representatives of gay rights groups, including Lt. Gov. Newsom and Mayor Lee. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent the archbishop her own letter.
Gregg Cassin, who emceed the San Francisco anti-Proposition 8 rally on the eve of the U.S. Supreme Court arguments last year, spoke with Catholic San Francisco and with the archdiocesan director of communications when the group delivered its petition. However, when Catholic San Francisco later asked about his affiliation with Faithful America, Cassin said he was not part of any organized group.
In the letter to Archbishop Cordileone, Faithful America wrote, “We respect freedom of religion and understand that you oppose civil marriage for same-sex couples. But the actions and rhetoric of … the event’s speakers and co-sponsors fundamentally contradict Christian belief in the fundamental human dignity of all people.”
In its online petition, Faithful America wrote “By speaking alongside these extremists, Archbishop Cordileone risks lending the church’s authority to their vitriol and hatred – and undermining Pope Francis’s call for a more compassionate church.”
Archbishop Cordileone, who was a keynote speaker at the rally on the national mall, wrote an 830-word response addressed to “Dear Citizens,” saying “The March for Marriage is not ‘anti-LGBT’ (as some have described it); it is not anti-anyone or anti-anything. Rather, it is a pro-marriage march.”
As bishop, Archbishop Cordileone wrote, he must proclaim “the whole truth about the human person and God’s will for our flourishing … including especially the truth about marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. That is what I will be doing on June 19.”
“I am grateful to the archbishop for standing up for marriage and the rights and needs of children,” said Father John Jimenez, pastor of St. Charles Borromeo parish in San Francisco. “I have been a teacher both in public and Catholic schools for over 20 years. This is a most vital and fundamental issue.”
“It is unbelievable any Catholic would have a problem with what the archbishop did,” said Mary Ellen Peloso, a parishioner at Church of the Nativity in Menlo Park. “Good for him, and to be expected of him.”
By their demonstration and open letter, Faithful America suggested ordinary Catholics were upset about the archbishop’s decision to participate in the March for Marriage, and that it was a “hate” event. However, the rally was not directed against homosexuals but for marriage and the archbishop did not speak against gays, noted Jesuit Father John Piderit, Archdiocese of San Francisco moderator of the curia and vicar for administration.
“To operate successfully in the public sphere, American Catholics need clear knowledge about the forces arrayed against them,” said Father Piderit.
“Similar to other groups, Faithful America is a well-funded pressure group that espouses a variety of viewpoints contrary to Catholic teaching. Informed Catholics are aware that such groups regularly promote their viewpoints in the media,” Father Piderit said.
‘Gay marriage’ advocates fund Faithful America Disagreement about the definition of marriage and traditional sexual morality is more than a struggle over legalizing “same sex marriage,” said Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and author of a June Crisis magazine column titled “Marginalizing Catholic teaching one grant at a time,” and “Renewal: How a New Generation of Faithful Priests and Bishops Is Revitalizing the Catholic Church” (Encounter Books 2013).
“It’s not just law,” Hendershott said, saying the fight over marriage goes beyond legalizing same-sex marriage. Gay rights activists want more, she said: “It’s changing hearts and minds. It’s changing the culture.”
Faithful America is partially financed by three of the country’s top gay rights activists and nonprofit foundation funders of LGBT initiatives, Colorado multimillionaire political activist Gill and Michigan billionaire Stryker as well as by progressive billionaire Soros. Gill, Soros and Stryker are not Catholic and do not live in the Archdiocese of San Francisco. “Catholics should treat these people with dignity, but Catholics also should be aware of their agenda and their tactics,” said Father Piderit.
“These funders are looking out at society, and seeing where there is resistance to the agenda they seek to promote and how they can best change that,” said Jeff Walton, spokesman for The Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Christian advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
“They look at these institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church as obstacles to what they would call full inclusion of LGBT persons in the life of the nation. They have essentially gone ahead and sought to change that voice so it is not resistant to the proposals that they have,” Walton said.
Faithful America’s finances Faithful America describes itself on its website as “the largest and fastest growing online community of Christians putting faith into action for social justice.” It is “an independent grass-roots organization made up of more than 300,000 Christians from a variety of denominations,” Faithful America executive director Michael Sherrard said.
But Faithful America is not independently incorporated so its financials are not public. It accepts tax deductible donations via Citizen Engagement Laboratory Education Fund, an arm of Citizen Engagement Laboratory. This latter group provides technical and administrative support not only to Faithful America but also to about a dozen progressive online entities, according to its website and Sherrard.
Citizen Engagement Laboratory Education Fund is a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) organization, which gave one grant of $1.7 million, worth 98 percent of its budget, to Citizen Engagement Laboratory, according to CEL Education Fund’s 990 tax return for 2012, its only publicly available tax return.
Citizen Engagement Laboratory is a tax-exempt 501 (c) (4) organization so contributions to it are not tax deductible. As a 501 (c) (4), Citizen Engagement Laboratory can contribute to political candidates, run phone banks and contribute to independent fundraising committees known as Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Its 990 tax return for 2012 shows revenue of $6.2 million.
Neither type of nonprofit is required to list most donors.
The normal activities Faithful America and Citizen Engagement Laboratory undertake are legal for a political advocacy organization. But they operate as political advocacy organizations, and are incorporated that way, not as religious or faith organizations. Faithful America lists no affiliation with a church or denomination. “As is the case for any other group, the group can get its message out,” said Father Piderit. But he said, it is important to note: “The message is part of a larger strategy, and the appearance of open letters and demonstrators is planned, not spontaneous.”
Faithful America’s website history Faithful America’s website was first created in 2004, and at that time the domain was owned by the National Council of Churches, according to domaintools.com. Ownership of the faithfulamerica.org domain name was transferred in 2008 to Faith in Public Life, where it remained until mid-2013. In mid-2013, FaithfulAmerica.org was registered to a Panama based company, WhoisGuard, Inc., the same third-party company to which Citizen Engagement Laboratory’s engagementlab.org is registered. WhoisGuard, Inc. is a third-party purchaser of domains which enables the actual owner to hide its identity.
“Faithful America has never really existed. It’s a website name that’s been owned by various organizations,” said Jack Smith, editor of The Catholic Key, the newspaper of the Diocese of Kansas City/St. Joseph in Kansas. In July Faithful America launched an online campaign to get Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City to reinstate a parish food pantry worker who lost her Catholic Church job after her marriage to another woman was publicized by a local newspaper.
“In its various campaigns Faithful America deceives by pretending to be local Catholics to pressure other Catholics to be silent about the truth and beauty of marriage,” Smith said.
Very few of the signatures on the Kansas petition came from local Catholics, Smith said. He notes that Faithful America, Faith in Public Life, and the Citizen Engagement Laboratory were and/or are funded by Soros’ foundations. “If you’ve got a Soros organization email list, you can get 20,000 signatures for anything,” Smith said.
Who is giving In her column “Marginalizing Catholic teaching one grant at a time,” Crisis Magazine columnist Hendershott says proponents of gay marriage are aware that “the biggest stumbling block to ‘speeding equality’ for the LGBT community is the Catholic Church.” She notes that wealthy activists are using their foundations to fund nonprofits that work by using the language of faith to persuade Catholics to take positions contrary to their faith.
Faithful America receives large grants from people and groups who are diametrically opposed to some core teachings of the Catholic faith.
In March, Stryker’s Arcus Foundation announced a $75,000 grant to Faithful America in a press release that stated: “Faithful America, in partnership with the CEL Education Fund, plans to support ‘Faithful America’s’ public campaigns to promote greater media visibility for Christians who denounce the abuse of religious-freedom arguments to oppose full equality for LGBT persons.” Stryker has contributed millions to Democratic causes and gave $1 million to defeat California’s Proposition 8 in 2008.
According to Funders for LGBTQ Issues, the Arcus Foundation for years has been the top grant-making foundation for advancing gay rights in the U.S. It is probably the biggest donor to LGBT-oriented groups working to influence religious belief, Hendershott said.
Another organization working to influence religious belief is the Gill Foundation, which according to its website contributed $20,000 in 2012 to Faithful America. Gill founded the Gill Foundation in 1996 to advance gay rights. He is a major Democratic and gay rights political campaign money bundler and was described by online news site Politico May 2 as “the most influential gay donor most people have never heard of” for his role in advancing the gay rights agenda through state and local elections.
Based on tax returns and reviews of grant-making foundations, perhaps the biggest individual funder of Faithful America is George Soros. Soros’ Open Society Institute awarded $150,000 in grants to Faithful America via the CEL Education Fund, according to the Open Society Institute’s 2012 990 tax return and Bill Vandenberg, director of special initiatives for U.S. Open Society Foundations. The 2012 grant was for Faithful America “to build a faith-based online advocacy project,” according to the grant description and coincides with Faithful America’s new website that launched in mid-2013.
Soros’ Foundation to Promote an Open Society gave more than $1.1 million to Faith in Public Life, the previous home for Faithful America, according to tax returns for 2009, 2010 and 2011.
“Faithful America to us seemed a very compelling opportunity to use online tools to allow tens of thousands and now hundreds of thousands of people to express their perspective on the issues of the day,” Vandenberg said. “We’ve made no conditions on our grant” regarding specific issues, he said. “This is up to the organizations to determine what their priorities are.”
Faithful America also received grants from New Media Ventures and from the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund in 2013, Sherrard said. The Haas Jr. Fund, which lists “equal marriage rights and other protections for gays and lesbians” as one of its five priorities, gave $30,000 to Citizen Engagement Lab Education Fund “for the Faithful America project to mobilize Christians to support gay equality.”
New Media Ventures gave $25,000 to Faithful America as part of its first ever set of grants to support “nonprofit entrepreneurs that are using media and technology to drive progressive change,” according to its website.
Representatives of the Arcus Foundation and the Gill Foundation declined to comment for this story.
Moveon.org connection Faithful America operates using many of the same techniques perfected by Democratic organizing and fundraising organization Moveon.org and has informal connections to Moveon.org.
Moveon.org was created in 1998 with an online petition to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” The goal was to move the nation past President Clinton’s impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, which were related to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It is a political action committee.
Faithful America’s executive director Sherrard says, “We don’t have any formal or financial relationship” with Moveon.org, and its petition to Archbishop Cordileone was posted on the Moveon.org site “as a way to reach membership.”
However, there are informal connections to the political action committee.
Sherrard worked as a Moveon.org campaigner/online organizer for more than four years, from May 2008 until February 2013, before taking his current position, according to Sherrard’s Linkedin.com profile.
Citizen Engagement Laboratory – the umbrella organization for Faithful America – is modeled on Moveon.org, and several Citizen Engagement Laboratory staff worked previously for Moveon.org, according to engagementlab.org, and interviews in an Oct. 13, 2013, article in The Nation.
Faithful America financial supporter Soros contributed $2.5 million to Moveon.org in 2003-04, according to Federal Election Commission campaign finance reports, part of his effort to defeat President George W. Bush.
Criticism of archbishop Sherrard said what is important is Faithful America’s criticism of Archbishop Cordileone.
“We’re disappointed that the archdiocese seems more interested in scrutinizing Faithful America than in listening to the thousands of Catholics saddened that Archbishop Cordileone chose to appear alongside hate groups at an anti-gay rally,” Sherrard said in a July 10 email to Catholic San Francisco.
However, it is hard to tell if thousands of Catholics were actually saddened by the archbishop’s appearance at the March for Marriage. Catholic San Francisco did not examine the reported 30,000-plus signatures on the Faithful America online petition. But, the eight self identified Catholics who signed the letter to the archbishop espouse views the Catholic Church has declared dissident. Many have been publicly reprimanded by church authorities and several of the organizations they represent have been singled out as having no right to call themselves Catholic.
Ten percent of those who signed the letter to Archbishop Cordileone publicly have identified themselves as Catholic at one point or another, based on Catholic San Francisco research using Google’s search engine. All of them oppose Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage. That includes the only signer who identifies as Catholic and lives in the archdiocese: Lt. Gov. Newsom, who presided over the first California same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco.
Perhaps 20 of the 78 signers of the letter to Archbishop Cordileone, including Newsom, reside in Marin, San Mateo or San Francisco counties, based on Google search.
The other seven apparently Catholic signers of the letter to Archbishop Cordileone are vocal opponents of Catholic teaching on homosexuality. Six of the seven of signers and organizations have been specifically renounced or chastised by Catholic Church authorities at one point or another. The seventh self-identified Catholic signer is executive director of a non-Catholic organization which opposes Catholic teaching.
The six self-identified Catholic signers who were personally chastised or criticized or whose organizations were chastised or disavowed by Catholic Church authorities are: excommunicated and defrocked Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois; Dignity USA executive director Marianne Duddy-Burke; Call to Action executive director Jim FitzGerald ; co-founder of New Ways Ministry Sister of Loretto Jeannine Gramick; executive director of New Ways Ministry Francis DeBernardo; and self-identified lesbian theologian Mary E. Hunt, co-director of Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual.
The seventh self-identified Catholic signer is Jody Huckaby, executive director of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). He leads an organization that promotes same sex marriage and homosexual adoption, but does not identify as religious although he personally calls himself both gay and Catholic.
“We’ve come to the perspective that there really needs to be dialogue in the Catholic Church about the morality of same-sex relationships,” said DeBernardo, who said New Ways supports civil same-sex marriage. People should decide whether to be in a “committed” same-sex relationship themselves, he said. “Primacy of conscience even if the conscience disagrees with the church’s position is of the utmost importance,” DeBernardo told Catholic San Francisco.
Archdiocese of San Francisco marriage and family life director Ed Hopfner said primacy of conscience comes with obligations. “In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we are taught that we must always obey our consciences,” Hopfner said, but adds that the catechism also says we have a duty to inform our conscience particularly through the teaching of the church. The catechism states that people can make erroneous judgments, due to the bad example of others or as the Catechism states, “assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, (or) rejection of the church’s authority and her teaching.”
Faithful America is funded by people who oppose the church’s most fundamental beliefs about the dignity of the human person, marriage, and family – and are using the tools of political activism to promote their erroneous views, falsely presenting them as alternative teachings of the Catholic Church, Father Piderit said.
But, “once one knows the social and political commitments of people donating funds that eventually are received by Faithful America and similar groups, the strategy of these groups is fairly straightforward,” said Father Piderit. “It only deceives those who do not acquaint themselves with the funding sources for the organization. Catholics who are ‘wise as serpents’ understand the difference between a spontaneous reaction and a well-orchestrated one.”
Comments We welcome comments on the series. Please write letters.csf@sfarchdiocese.org.
From CSF Special Report in September 12, 2014 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
**Many Catholics in the San Francisco Bay Area were surprised by the strong negative reaction to Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone’s decision to give a talk about traditional marriage at a June 19 Washington, D.C., rally organized to support marriage. **
Why should they be surprised? He is an Archbishop with a spine — telling the biblical truth!
**Now there is abundant evidence the reaction was both well planned and financed by Faithful America, an organization that is supported directly and indirectly by politically powerful and wealthy men and by grant-making foundations who have devoted millions of dollars to promoting acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) behavior.**
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