Know him by his friends

A familiar name popped up recently, as I was reading a terrific essay in New York magazine by Frank Rich about the “old, white, rich men who are buying this election” by giving bazillions to super-PACs. Its title was “Sugar Daddies.”

One of those sugar daddies is a multimillionaire named Frank VanderSloot, owner of an Idaho-based company called Melaleuca. It’s a multi-level marketing organization, similar to Amway or Herbalife, that sells dubious “wellness” products using a pyramid scheme that relies on signing up ever more suckers to sell the stuff. In fact, the average salesperson makes $87 a year.

Turns out VanderSloot, a long-time associate of Mitt Romney’s and one of his national finance chairs, has donated $1 million to the candidate’s Restore Our Future super-PAC.

I remember VanderSloot from when I was editor of Boise Weekly, a paper similar to the CN&R. In 1999 he was at the center of one of the biggest local stories of the year, a red-hot controversy involving freedom of the press and blatant homophobia that went on for months.

It had to do with Idaho Public Television’s plan to broadcast a half-hour documentary about teaching tolerance called It’s Elementary. The film is a modest effort showing how several schools, public and private, were trying to foster tolerance toward homosexuals among students.

To VanderSloot this was intolerable. Like many if not most Idaho Mormons—the state is 27 percent LDS—VanderSloot viewed homosexuals as sinful creatures, and he was not about to tolerate a show about them on public television.

He put up billboards across the state accusing IPTV of trying to turn the state’s children into homosexuals—a blatant corruption of the film’s message—and began pressuring the legislature to intervene. At one point VanderSloot and a half-dozen lawmakers went to the IPTV offices and threatened to cut its funding if its general manager didn’t agree not to run the piece.

Eventually then-Gov. Dirk Kempthorne intervened and a compromise was reached: The show would air, but only once—at 11:30 on a Sunday night.

Mormons like to pooh-pooh criticism of their long history of not allowing blacks to become priests or participate in temple ceremonies, practices they abandoned in 1978. But their intolerance toward homosexuals is relevant and continues to this day. Led by the LDS church, Mormons were the major backer—to the tune of an estimated $22 million—of Proposition 8 in 2008, which narrowly overturned the California Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage.

Just as Frank VanderSloot did in 1999, the church blatantly lied in its pro-8 campaign, running TV ads charging that, unless the measure passed, gay marriage would be taught in schools.

Now VanderSloot and other rich Mormons are contributing millions to Mitt Romney’s super-PAC. Makes me wonder: Is Romney as homophobic as they are?

Robert Speer is editor of the CN&R.