Mitt Romney's National Finance Co-Chairman

Photo via AP

I've spent a good deal of time looking at Rick Santorum's far right religious extremism and his animus towards LGBT citizens. But Mitt Romney has some pretty nasty baggage himself as he panders to the foulest elements in the Republican Party base. One of those pieces of baggage, in my opinion, is Frank VanderSloot (pictured above left) who serves as Romney's National Finance co-chair. While Santorum would have an Opus Dei mindset run his administration, Romney seems only too happy to involve anti-gay Mormon extremists into his camp. VanderSloot - who reportedly contributed generously to support the Proposition 8 anti-gay campaign - would appear to be a case in point. Slate has an article by Glenn Greenwald on VanderSloot which is anything from flattering. It seems, in my opinion, that none of the GOP presidential nominee candidates have ever heard of the concept of "live and let live" or grasps the concept that the right to freedom of religion applies to those other than far right Catholics, Mormons and Christianist minded Evangelicals. Here are some highlights from the Slate article (read the entire article):

Frank VanderSloot is an Idaho billionaire and the CEO of Melaleuca, Inc., a controversial billion-dollar-a-year company which peddles dietary supplements and cleaning products; back in 2004, Forbes, echoing complaints to government agencies, described the company as “a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway.” VanderSloot has long used his wealth to advance numerous right-wing political causes. Currently, he is the national finance co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, and his company has become one of the largest donors ($1 million) to the ostensibly “independent” pro-Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future.

But it is VanderSloot’s chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics — magazines, journalists, and bloggers — that makes him particularly pernicious and worthy of more attention. In the last month alone, VanderSloot, using threats of expensive defamation actions, has successfully forced Forbes, Mother Jones and at least one local gay blogger in Idaho to remove articles that critically focused on his political and business practices (Mother Jones subsequently re-posted the article with revisions a week after first removing it). He has been using this abusive tactic in Idaho for years: suppressing legitimate political speech by threatening or even commencing lawsuits against even the most obscure critics . . . .

Numerous journalists and bloggers in Idaho — who want to write critically about VanderSloot’s vast funding of right-wing political causes — are petrified even to mention his name for fear of these threats. As his work on the Romney campaign brings him national notoriety, he is now aiming these tactics beyond Idaho. To allow this scheme to continue — whereby billionaires can use their bottomless wealth to intimidate ordinary citizens and media outlets out of writing about them — is to permit the wealthiest in America to thuggishly shield themselves from legitimate criticism and scrutiny.

VanderSloot is a devout Mormon and has been an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) since 1965. . . . He has a history of virulent anti-gay activism, including the spearheading of a despicable billboard campaign condemning Idaho Public Television for a documentary, entitled It’s Elementary, that was designed to provide “a window into what really happens when teachers address lesbian and gay issues with their students in age-appropriate ways”. . . . In 2008, VanderSloot’s wife, Belinda, donated $100,000 to California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 campaign.

VanderSloot has become the Romney campaign’s national finance co-chairman; four companies he controls gave a total of $1 million to Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney SuperPAC; he “has held Romney fund-raisers at his Idaho Falls ranch in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns”; and Romney lavishly praised him this way: “Frank’s vision and sense of social responsibility is second to none and he never ceases to amaze me.”

But now, VanderSloot may have picked the wrong person to bully. Jody May-Chang is an independent journalist and an LGBT spokesperson in Boise. By coincidence, she was one of the local reporters who interviewed me last weekend when I spoke to the annual Bill of Rights dinner of the ACLU in Idaho. At the end of the interview, she mentioned to me the series of threats issued to local LGBT journalists and bloggers by VanderSloot. Unbeknownst to May-Chang at the time, she, too, had been targeted for the crime of speaking critically of the Idaho CEO.

May-Chang is determined not to succumb to this bullying or to relinquish her right to opine and report on the conduct of a very significant political figure in her state. Though she did remove the photograph of VanderSloot, she refuses to relinquish her right criticize his political activism. As she put it to me: “his legal team insists that neither VanderSloot nor his company have an anti-gay position, but when placed up against his actions that assertion is laughable.” She added: I think the real issue here is about promoting a religious social agenda that fits in with the LDS belief system . . . .

Threatening journalists and bloggers with baseless lawsuits and trying to suppress free debate is a recognized menace. Close to 30 states in the U.S. have adopted so-called anti-SLAPP statutes — designed to punish “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPP). Those statutes create causes of action against those who abuse the legal system not to vindicate legal rights, but to intimidate and silence critics. Organizations such as The Public Participation Project now exist exclusively to defend those victimized by SLAPP suits or the threat of them.

And lawyers — whether working in-house for a corporation or a private law firm — have an independent duty not to threaten frivolous lawsuits for improper ends.

Anyone who is the national finance co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign deserves probing, substantial scrutiny.

As I note frequently, I find it most instructive that those who most love to wrap themselves in the mantle of religiosity are the ones who least practice what they claim to preach - especially when it comes to obeying the Commandment against bearing false witness and following the so-called "Golden Rule." As I noted before, the best argument for fleeing from religion is its "devoted" and "pious" followers.