This is a follow up to an earlier diary that quoted from Californians Against Hate's list of the top financial contributors to Proposition 8.
So as to better understand the modus operandi of the religious right and its financial backers, I thought it might be interesting to do a series of diaries that go into further depth on these hate spreaders.
Thus, I will start with a profile of Elsa Prince Broekhuizen of Michigan, a Christian fundamentalist billionaire tied to Amway, Blackwater Security, and the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation. It is through this foundation that the right wing Prince family can contribute to right wing causes.
Elsa Prince (Broekhuizen), shown above in a Calvin College Trustee photo, is, along with her family, about as right wing as an American can be. (Incidentallly, Broekhuizen is the last name of her current husband, whom she married following the death of Edgar Prince.)
For example, her deceased former husband Edgar, along with Gary Bauer, started up the Family Research Council. Her son, Erik D. Prince, a former political appointee in George W. Bush's administration, started the security firm Blackwater, which made profits from sweetheart deals with the federal government. Blackwater was also involved in attacks on Iraqi civilians, a crime for which it has never been properly prosecuted, thanks to the Bush White House. As one source puts it,
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, the scandal-plagued BushCo mercenary group that, since 2004, has been paid at least $323 million on a $1 billion no-bid government contract. Blackwater is in the headlines now because six of its mercenaries may be facing charges for the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007. Earlier scandals have included the abrupt resignation of State Dept. Inspector Howard Krongard over Blackwater-related perjury charges, allegations that Blackwater employees were traitorously recruiting U.S. troops in the war zone and that and Blackwater security shot a dog belonging to the New York Times Baghdad bureau.
But back to Elsa. She has served on such Boards/Foundations as
*Calvin College, Trustee
*Council for National Policy, Board of Governors, 1998
*Family Research Council, board member
*Focus on the Family, board member
*Focus on the Family Action, board member, 2004 (source)
She was also the top individual contributor to Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, contributing $75,000 to the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, in 2004.
The Council for National Policy, which Elsa Prince funds, is described as:
a secretive far right tax-exempt organization that brings together the most powerful radical right activists and financial backers in order to coordinate strategy. The group's membership is secret and its meetings—held three to four times per year—are not publicly announced. According to Russ Bellant in The Coors Connection, Morton Blackwell of the Council for National Policy has said "the policy is that we don't discuss who attends the meetings or what is said." The organization was founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, a leader of Moral Majority and Texan conservative T. Cullen Davis. LaHaye brought together representatives from the Religious Right, the White House, elected officeholders, the political right, and rightwing businessmen and setup an atmosphere that would blend the religious right and "the low-tax, anti-government" right (source). The CNP's newsletters take credit for everything from helping to kill health care reform to blocking regulations restricting religious expression in the workplace (source). In the 1980s, the Council for National Policy was heavily involved in channeling money from the religious right into a variety of efforts supporting President Ronald Reagan's Central America policies ranging from building support in for his policies in the United States to building ties with the international right via arms dealers, mercenaries, and other such forces
Also, its Executive Committee has included Oliver North, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, Richard DeVos, Tim LaHaye, and Richard Shoff, a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Indiana. Essentially, then, Mrs. Prince is tied, closely, to a Republican affiliated organization which seeks to act in the most clandestine manner possible so as to effect right wing policy. This is her, and her family's, M.O. .
And, here is more on her foundation, The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation
formed by auto parts manufacturer Edgar Prince and his wife Elsa Prince (now Elsa Prince-Broekhuizen), is a major financial backer of the religious right in West Michigan and at the national level. While locally the Ada, Michigan based DeVos family and their foundations are more well-known, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation has been bankrolling the religious right for years. Formed with money from Edgar Prince's Holland, Michigan based company Prince Automotive, the Foundation has supported a variety of religious right entities according to a review of grant data performed by Media Mouse for the years 2003 to 2005, as well as research Media Mouse has done into the Foundation's giving over the past decade. In the corporate media, the Prince family's philanthropy has primarily been described as being civic-minded and targeted towards the improvement of the Holland community, despite the fact that a thorough examination of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation's grants show that the family has also used a considerable portion of its money to support its ideological and political goals.
The Foundation was formed by Edgar and his wife Elsa, both of whom have been major involved in the religious right in an organizing capacity beyond just giving money. Edgar Prince was heavily involved in the Family Research Council and was a board member of the organization at the time of his death in 1995. Edgar Prince and his family's foundation played an important role in the formation of the organization, with the Prince family providing much of the seed money needed to start the organization in 1988 and later serving as a founding board member when the organization became independent of Focus on the Family in 1992. Elsa Prince is currently on the board of the organization, and because of the large amount of money given to the organization by the Prince family, the Family Research Council runs its mail order operations out of a building in Holland. When Edgar Prince died in 1995, he was eulogized by Gary Bauer, who praised Prince's Christian ethic and his dedication to the religious right movement. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation has also been a major supporter of Focus on the Family, supporting the organization with a $5 million contribution to the organization's "Welcome Center" at its headquarters while also giving it ongoing support over the years. Elsa Prince is on the board of Focus on the Family and Edgar and Elsa have both served as leaders in the Council for National Policy, a secretive organization linking religious right organizers and financial benefactors for the purpose of coordinating activity. Elsa also serves as a trustee at Grand Rapids' Calvin College and in 2004 was the top individual contributor to the anti-gay marriage initiative in Michigan.
The family's children--Emilie, Betsy, Eileen, and Erik--have are also active in the religious right, with all of them joining their mother as directors of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation. Of the children, Betsy and Erik have been particularly active in the religious right, with Betsy Prince marrying Dick DeVos and financially supporting the religious right through their Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation and becoming nationally known activist in the Republican Party and within the religious right, while Erik Prince formed the private mercenary army Blackwater with the assistance of his family's fortune and political connections. Elsa Prince also remarried in 2000, marrying Ren Broekhuizen, a retired pastor at Holland's Ridge Point Community Church. Broekhuizen has his own roots in the religious right and has served on the board of the Grand Rapids, Michigan based Acton Institute and as a trustee at the Russian-American Christian University.
When reviewing the grants awarded by the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, one sees a foundation that has given to a wide array of organizations making up the religious right and has supported the multi-faceted approach used by the religious right. That organizing approach has consisted of grassroots organizing, political action, legal action, and support for evangelical ministries. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, as mentioned earlier, has been a major supporter of the Family Research Council. In 2003 and 2004, the Foundation gave the Family Research Council a little over a million dollars. The Family Research Council has become one of the leading religious right organizations, and has been active in organizing against gay rights and gay marriage and has promoted state-sponsored prayer, vouchers for religious schools, and abstinence only education. Between 2003 and 2005, the Foundation also gave a little over a million dollars to Focus on the Family, another major organization in the anti-gay movement and the religious right. Michigan's Focus on the Family affiliate, the Michigan Family Forum, received $50,000 from the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation from 2004 to 2005, while their daughter, Emilie Wierda, sat on the board. The foundation gave $5,000 in 2005 to the California Family Council, a religious right organization in California working to "protect and foster Judeo-Christian principles in California's laws" as an associate organization with Focus on the Family. The California Family Council's three "foundation pillars" include opposition to abortion rights through the "protection of the unborn," opposition to gay marriage through its "plan for marriage" that sees marriage between a man and a woman as the "building block of a stable society," and the "authority of parents" to allow parents to raise children according to their worldview. Support for the anti-gay movement was also given through $25,000 in contributions to the Free Congress Federation, a major organization in the New Right of the 1970s and a leader in the development of using anti-gay initiatives as a tool to build political power and infrastructure. The Focus on the Family-linked National Day of Prayer Taskforce, headed by James Dobson's wife Shirley, received $60,000 from the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation from 2003 to 2005. The Foundation has also supported organizations that have promoted a patriarchal view of women and marriage, including the Promise Keepers who received $55,000 from 2003 to 2005, Concerned Women of America who received $3,000, and the Eagle Forum, while the media monitoring Media Research Center received $1,000 in 2005.
And in case one thinks that this foundation does not mean business, there is also this
The Foundation has also provided support to the legal arm of the religious right, which has been using the courts to challenge the separation of state for the past thirty-five years. In addition to working to break down the barriers separating church and state, the religious right's legal apparatus has defended the gains of the movement in the courts. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave $105,000 to the Alliance Defense Fund, one of the major organizations taking on this role in the religious right. The Alliance Defense Fund works in three major areas--"guarding the sanctity of human life," "the protection of family values," and "defending religious freedom." In practical terms, this has meant attacking abortion rights through the courts and defending anti-abortion protestors, working to prevent same-sex marriage, and filing lawsuits to prevent the removal of religious symbols from government buildings
So, there we are. The sickeningly, hateful, antidemocratic background of a wealthy, powerful, matriarch who would be motivated to donate $450,000 to suppport Proposition 8, a state proposition in a state not even her own. It has to be a powerful well of hatred within her to do something like that. Think of all the good that could be accomplished with half a million dollars.
Incidentally, some good news in all of this. The hate group Focus on the Family - on whose board Prince serves - has been dealing with these tough economic times by laying off 20% of its staff. Perhaps Elsa Prince can focus on the families of those thrown out of work with some sort of handout and can leave the rest of us alone.
UPDATE: Here is Californians Against Hate's commercial responding to Elsa Prince.
