Editor's note: This article first appeared in the December issue of Citizen magazine.
You don't want to get on Tim Gill's bad side. Marilyn Musgrave could tell a few war stories.
Musgrave, a three-term congresswoman from Colorado, was a lead sponsor of the original Federal Marriage Amendment. Gill, a Denver-based software tycoon (founder of Quark), is perhaps the most powerful force for homosexual activism in American politics. So Musgrave is most definitely on Gill's bad side — and even in the often vicious world of politics, his efforts to get her booted from office have been way over the top.
When Musgrave ran for re-election in 2004, Gill funded television attack ads showing a woman portraying Musgrave — dressed in a pink suit — picking money from the pockets of soldiers on a battlefield. Another showed the same actress stealing a watch off of a corpse.
And in 2006, Gill and his allies spent nearly $1.4 million setting up a bogus pro-life group, Coloradans for Life, to attack Musgrave (who has a 100 percent pro-life voting record). The goal: Suppress the turnout of pro-life voters for Musgrave. It nearly worked; Musgrave survived, winning by less than 3 points. But she did survive. Most of Gill's targets can't say the same.
Dozens of conservative politicians have found themselves in Gill's crosshairs — and out of office as a result. Between his efforts and those he's recruited, he's helped produce Democratic majorities in state legislatures in places like Oregon, Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire. Political veterans are marveling at his impact.
"I have never seen in Colorado politics in the 30-some odd years where I've been active … any individual involved to the degree that Tim Gill is," Republican political consultant Katy Atkinson told the Rocky Mountain News. "Should he choose to, he can shape any part of Colorado public policy he wants to."
Now, he has taken his strategies nationwide, and pro-family forces have a fight on their hands.
Here comes the money
Gill doesn't fit the image of a
political firebrand. A self-described introvert who rarely speaks publicly, he
shuns the media spotlight.
An early job with a computer startup fueled a desire to run his own company, and after getting a $2,000 loan from his parents, he launched the software company Quark.
Eleven years later, in 1992, Gill began to refocus on the gay activism of his college days. By that time, Quark had become a major national and international firm, having hit the jackpot with its publishing software, QuarkXPress. And Gill had become a very rich man.
Following that fall's passage of Amendment 2 — the Colorado measure that prohibited localities from passing special gay-rights ordinances — Gill got angry, feeling that (as he would later put it) "the forces of evil are out to destroy us." So he began to put his new wealth to work on behalf of a pro-homosexual agenda.
Sponsorship and strings
In 1994, he formed the Gill
Foundation, investing huge amounts of his fortune to seed gay-rights
organizations in all 50 states. One, in particular, enjoyed spectacular growth.
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) swelled from a group run
out of an apartment to the leading gay-activist group in America's schools. And
they give the credit to their early chief funder.
"The gay community in its current form could not exist without Tim," GLSEN Executive Director Kevin Jennings told The Denver Post. "He created the infrastructure of national organizations like mine, and also in out-of-the-way-places where gay community centers never existed before."
By 2001, according to USA Today, Gill Foundation donations to homosexual-rights organizations around the country represented 20 percent of their annual budgets. As of this year, the foundation has made grants of well over $115 million, making Gill far and away the leading funder of the homosexual movement.
Beyond the vast sums of money, he quickly put his creative entrepreneurship to work.
For example, rather than simply funding hundreds of gay-rights groups, Gill launched training seminars around the country to help the organizations sharpen their message, hone their efficiency and raise money more effectively.
By 2000, Gill — though still largely below the radar of society — was clearly a hero to homosexual activists throughout the nation. Yet it was then he began telling others that the gay-rights movement needed to start to go on the offensive. "We have got to stop playing the victim role," he declared in early 2000.
Gradually, what Gill's people describe as "strategic philanthropy" began to be accompanied by "strategic politics." In the political cycle of 2000, Gill gave $300,000 to political campaigns, followed by $800,000 in 2002.
That giving, however, merely set the table for 2004, when Gill dumped an astonishing $5 million into races, mostly in Colorado. As former Colorado Senate President John Andrews said, Gill "overwhelmed us with a tsunami of money."
What distinguished Gill from other political donors was his strategy. Instead of simply pouring money into high-profile campaigns for Senate or Congress — what Gill calls "glamour giving" — he put much of his money into local races in an effort to shift control of the Colorado Legislature to gay-friendly Democrats.
Gill's excursion into Colorado politics was smashingly successful. Democrats took control of both the state House and Senate for the first time in three decades, even as President Bush carried Colorado by a solid margin. Spurred on by his success, Gill decided to radically up the ante and widen the scope. So in 2005, he formed a new political entity, the Gill Action Fund, and set his sights nationwide.
In 2006, Gill and his cadre of allies carefully targeted a total of 70 state and local races in a dozen states. Gill's targets were chosen either because of their outspoken leadership on traditional marriage or because knocking them out could help switch a legislative chamber to Democrat — and thus gay-friendly — control. To fund it all, Gill pumped in an astounding $15 million of his own money — on top of millions from his friends. This time, Gill won 50 of his targeted races, and in the process, gave Democrats control of several state legislative chambers.
But in many ways, Gill was also stealthier than ever in 2006, apparently aware that a single out-of-state mega-donor could arouse suspicions and backlash in far-away states. So he again recruited donors, finding pro-homosexual contributors who would write small- to medium-sized checks to favored legislative candidates.
So well did this scheme work that one of Gill's targets — Danny Carroll, the Republican speaker pro-tem in the Iowa House of Representatives — didn't even realize he'd been a target of a national homosexual campaign until a reporter from The Atlantic magazine called him after the election and walked him through campaign-finance reports.
And what did Gill get for all of it? Plenty.
New Democrat majorities in New Hampshire promptly passed a civil-unions law. In Iowa, where Carroll lost his seat and the Republicans lost the House, the Democrat Legislature enacted a homosexual nondiscrimination law. And Oregon's new Democrat lawmakers pushed through variations of the aforementioned laws. Democrat gains in Iowa and Indiana also stopped state marriage amendments in their tracks — all the more important in the wake of this summer's homosexual "marriage" in Iowa.
Meanwhile, back in Colorado, where Gill spent another $5 million and helped elect a pro-homosexual governor and several state legislators, the payoff was rich. Republican Sen. Josh Penry summarized the 2007 state legislative session this way: "Windmills, mill levies and a million paybacks to Tim Gill."
Among those paybacks:
-- A law allowing homosexual couples to adopt
children.
-- A statute that completely redefines the family in Colorado. No
longer will the usual definition of "blood, marriage or adoption" apply.
Instead, any two or more people living together as a single household can be
legally considered a family in the Rocky Mountain State.
-- Colorado joined
Iowa and Oregon in passing a homosexual nondiscrimination law. Although a late
amendment exempted religious organizations, the law could force Christian
businesses — including for-profit Christian radio stations — to hire
homosexuals, bisexuals and "transgenders."
For Gill, not a bad investment at all.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Watch a CBN report on Tim
Gill.
Learn where the political donations are headed.
For federal races, click here, here or here.
For state races, click here.
(NOTE: Referral to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)
