Kathleen Parker, a columnist for The Washington Post writes:
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.
It is a decent column, except for this bit:
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.”
But here are Ahmanson’s own words, spoken in an interview published in August, 2004 with the Orange County Register that was meant to soften his bellicose image:
“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. 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. But I don’t think it’s at all a necessity.”
The series in which he made these remarks is online here, although the link to part three, in which the quote occurs seems to be broken. You can read more about Ahmanson and his role in attempting to break up the Anglican Communion in part one of my series Following the Money