Howard Ahmanson, the heir to one of Southern California’s great family fortunes and a major contributor to right-wing extremist causes, including most recently donating $1 million to Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment, has shocked the California political establish by abandoning the Republican Party and now says he’s a Democrat.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker broke the story after the hyper-reclusive Ahmanson agreed to speak with her:
In what one might call a biblical move, Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson — one of three major funders of California’s Proposition 8, which bans 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 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,” Ahmanson told me by telephone.
So, without fanfare, Ahmanson printed out an online form and mailed in his Democratic Party registration. Thus far, he’s heard nothing back, but confesses to hoping he’ll receive a little card or something.
Early in his life, Ahmanson, now 58, was a follower of the late Rousas John Rushdoony, who was an advocate of replacing the Constitution as the foundation of U.S. law with the Bible, which meant, among many other barbaric practices, that gay people would be stoned to death.
Parker writes that Ahmanson’s views on social matters has “mellowed” a bit:
Rushdoony’s ideas captured Ahmanson’s imagination in what the philanthropist now calls “my wild youth,” but he has mellowed. Ahmanson certainly doesn’t believe that homosexuals should be executed, as some of his critics have suggested, but he does believe that gays should “come to Christ and then recover.”
He is also no longer the welfare abolitionist he used to be, “though I hate the attitude that welfare, once granted, is a moral entitlement that can never be reduced. And Social Security and Medicare are included in my definition of welfare.”
Ahmanson has not completely abandoned his GOP tendencies, however. Parker wrote that while he liked Sarah Palin in the presidential campaign last year, he plans on supporting Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2012.
