In 1992, Ahmanson banded together with four right-wing businessmen to back the campaigns of anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big business candidates; two years later, they scored their first major victory, propelling the GOP's takeover of the California Assembly. With $3 million funneled through seven pro-business, anti-abortion and Republican political action fronts, Ahmanson and company captured a startling 25 of the GOP's 39 legislative seats for their candidates. Their push ushered two important movement cadres into power: Tom McClintock, a veteran activist and former director of economic and regulatory affairs of the Ahmanson-funded libertarian think tank Claremont Institute; and Ray Haynes, an unknown lawyer from another Ahmanson-funded group, the Western Center for Law and Justice, which once filed a brief defending a local school district for banning Gabriel Garcéa Marquéz's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

Upon seizing power, McClintock sponsored a bill returning the death penalty to California, while Haynes led a failed 1995 attempt to ban state funding for abortion and numerous futile fights to block anti-hate crime and domestic partnership legislation. In 2003, the two Ahmanson cadres became instrumental figures in propelling the campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. In March 2003, Haynes personally convinced a fellow arch-conservative, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, to bankroll the recall ballot qualification. After the recall qualified with the help of $1.7 million from Issa, McClintock entered the recall campaign, ultimately finishing third as the token cultural conservative. As in 1992, Ahmanson's camp provided the groundwork for McClintock's campaign: John Stoos, an avowed Reconstructionist associated with Chalcedon, served as his deputy campaign manager, and Ahmanson hosted some of the most prominent leaders in the Christian right for a fundraiser in Colorado in September that, according to the Los Angeles Times, raised $100,000.

To complement his electoral efforts, Ahmanson has pumped enormous amounts of money into ballot measure committees, dramatically altering California's social landscape in the process. In 1999, Ahmanson helped to sharply restrict affirmative action in California with a $350,000 donation to Proposition 209; that same year he helped ban gay marriage with a donation of $210,000 -- 35 percent of all total funds -- to Proposition 22. To avoid giving voters the impression that Prop. 22 was somehow anti-gay, its "Protection of Marriage Committee" spent nearly half of Ahmanson's donation on billboards presenting the measure as "pro-family."

Despite his penchant for behind-the-scenes string-pulling, Ahmanson's anti-gay campaigns have attracted close scrutiny by Jerry Sloan, a Sacramento gay-rights advocate and founder of Project Tocsin.

"Ahmanson's financing of these various initiatives both statewide and locally and his financing of anti-gay legislators who fight tooth and toenail against any legislation that would protect people or enhance our rights as citizens has made the struggle for our rights probably two or three times harder than it should be," Sloan told me. "I can't think of anybody who's more dangerous to the average Californian than Howard Ahmanson."

With President Bush running for reelection cautiously signaling support for a constitutional amendment -- modeled after California's Prop. 22 -- to ban gay marriage, one of Ahmanson's key causes has gone national. And as donors to Bush's 2000 campaign, the Ahmansons couldn't be more pleased with the dividends of their investment. "We supported him the first time and we'll support him again," a doting Mrs. Ahmanson said of Bush.

Ahmanson's money has also sustained the operations of influential Washington insiders like Grover Norquist, an anti-tax lobbyist who once compared the federal income tax to date rape, as well as far-out groups like the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, an evangelical ministry entrenched in the shadows of Berkeley's People's Park working to undermine the local New Age scene, or what its monthly journal has called the "neo-pagans."

As an ardent anti-pornography activist, Ahmanson granted $160,000 in 1997 to the woman who helped bring down Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign, Donna Rice-Hughes, and her group Enough Is Enough, which this year successfully lobbied Congress to provide web filters in public libraries. "While I might advocate less liberty for vice, I recognize that all we can do in most cases is limit it somewhat and drive what remains underground rather than wipe it out," Ahmanson told me.

One of Ahmanson's most significant investments has been in the career of a man Mrs. Ahmanson describes as his "dear friend," Marvin Olasky, the most influential propagandist of the Christian right in the last decade. A former Jew turned Marxist who counts Rushdoony's Reconstructionism among his influences, Olasky spent most of the 1980s as an obscure journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. His first book, "Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration," was published by Ahmanson's privately held philanthropic entity, the Fieldstead Institute, and was co-authored by Fieldstead's director, Herbert Schlossberg. Though theological scholars ignored the book, it found its way into Washington's conservative circles, and by 1989 Olasky was offered the well-paying Bradley scholarship at the Heritage Foundation.

In 1992, Olasky wrote "The Tragedy of American Compassion," an argument for transferring government social welfare programs to the church. In his book, Olasky cites his "conservative Christian" friend Howard Ahmanson as proof that faith can cure poverty, describing how Ahmanson "found that poverty around the world is a spiritual as well as a material problem -- most poor people don't have faith that they and their situations can change."

Ahmanson told me "The Tragedy of American Compassion" is one of his favorite books, as it articulates his long-standing views on government's role in social welfare. "For government, social service is at best a secondary responsibility; it's a primary responsibility for the philanthropic-religious sector," he explained. "Governments feeding people, and priests and nuns firing cannon in national defense, may sometimes be necessary; but they are not the norm."

In 1993, "The Tragedy of American Compassion" earned Olasky an invitation from political strategist Karl Rove to meet with an evangelical Christian running for governor of Texas -- George W. Bush. Eventually the man Time magazine dubbed the "unlikely guru" would become a key advisor to Bush, instilling in him the politics of "compassionate conservatism." And when President Bush signed an executive order to create a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in January 2001, Olasky was standing by his side, beaming with pride as he watched the new president sign his ideas into government policy.

Another man who owes the success of his work to Ahmanson is Bruce Chapman, a former Reagan administration official and founder of the Seattle think tank Discovery Institute, a bastion for the intelligent design movement, which seeks to debunk Darwin's theory of evolution with scientific-sounding arguments. Americans United for Separation of Church and State calls Discovery "the most effective and politically savvy group pushing a religious agenda in America's public school science classes."

Ahmanson has been a major funder of Discovery. According to the Baptist Press, this year Ahmanson granted $2.8 million to the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, Discovery's intelligent design wing. With 48 well-heeled research fellows, directors and advisors, almost all of whom have advanced degrees from respectable universities, the center has given intelligent design a level of influence traditional creationism has not enjoyed.

This September, Discovery lobbied the Texas State Board of Education to mandate language in its high school biology textbooks challenging what Chapman called "fake facts" in evolutionary studies. After a heated debate in which dozens of Discovery fellows and their opponents from the scientific community testified, a panel voted to adopt the textbooks after a promise from the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency that all remaining "factual errors" would be addressed by publishers before the textbooks get into the hands of students. For example, at least one science text has used the common colloquial term "gill slits" to describe a feature found in human embryos; that feature proves to mainstream scientists that humans share an evolutionary lineage with prehistoric vertebrates. But Discovery calls that term "biologically bogus," and when the publisher agreed to drop it, the institute claimed a major victory.

But the victory is at best cosmetic, and hardly a blow against the teaching of evolution. According to Ed Darrell, a Texas social studies teacher and former botanist who testified before the board against Discovery, textbooks will merely use the formal scientific term "branchial arch" instead of "gill slit." Meanwhile, he said, Texas textbooks will continue to convey the science of evolution. "Discovery says they won, but they've got to do that in order to keep Ahmanson happy," Darrell said in an interview. "They came in here with guns blazing and got shot down. But they've got a lot of money and they'll probably be back."

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