New California House Candidate Funded by Advocate for Biblical Law
Walters, who ran unsuccessfully for California Treasurer in 2010, has received at least $22,500 over her career from Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson Jr.’s Fieldstead & Co — making it one of her top ten funders, and making her their second biggest state recipient. Ahmanson, heir to a banking fortune reported to total hundreds of millions, has distributed millions of dollars to right-wing political causes promoting a “Christian worldview.” Fieldstead & Co. is an incorporated private company which Ahmanson uses to distribute money to his favorite causes without having to disclose the donations publicly.
Most notorious among these was the Chalcedon Foundation. Ahmanson served for decades on the board of this radical Christian Reconstructionist organization and heavily funded its efforts. The group’s late founder, Rousas John Rushdoony advocated for American laws to literally follow those in the Book of Leviticus, including death by stoning for gay and lesbian people and similar execution for adulterers, juvenile delinquents, non-believers, and most other Americans. While Ahmanson has made clear he personally does not advocate “the stoning or execution of homosexuals,” he conceded to the Orange County Register in 1985: “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives.”
Ahmanson is a major funder and director of the Discovery Institute, a group which promotes creationism and tries to obstruct science education. He was one of the largest contributors to the unconstitutional Proposition 8 campaign to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry in California, spent heavily in support of school vouchers efforts in Colorado and California, backed CareNet (a group that provides “crisis pregnancy centers,” which mislead women about abortion), and, reportedly, funded a $1 million smear campaign against the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop and efforts to split the worldwide Anglican Communion over LGBT inclusion.
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