In the wake of its fake news story about the University of Virginia fraternity house “gang rape” that in all probability never happened, I wondered whether to trust Rolling Stone ever again. It’s clearly an Establishment publication, well-oiled by moneyed interests, that for years has posed as a voice of the so-called counterculture. But just recently Rolling Stone ran a story that appears to check out. Unintentionally, Rolling Stone writer Andy Kroll may have blown the whistle on one of the reasons the LGBTQ movement has become so well-organized and powerful.
As with many things, just follow the money … much of which, in this case, can be traced to one person.
His name is Tim Gill, 63, a software developer, one of many who rode the wave of the 1990s tech explosion to a spot near the top. Born in 1953 in Indiana, he moved to the Denver, Colorado area with his parents when he was a child, and has resided there ever since. He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder where he majored in computer science. Initially he cut his teeth with Hewlett-Packard. Then, in 1981, he used a $2,000 loan from his parents to start his own company, Quark, Inc., based in Denver.
Quark began producing quality desktop publishing software. The company’s flagship product was QuarkXPress, the first version of which was introduced in 1987. QuarkXPress quickly earned an industry-wide reputation as the best software package able to handle complex, graphics-intensive page layouts, and by the mid-1990s subsequent versions had been adopted by major newspapers and other print publications across the country. Tim Gill became a multimillionaire, whose name appeared on Forbes Magazine’s well-known 400 list.
A gay man, Gill had already begun involving himself in gay rights issues. The convergence of political and popular cultures of the 1990s were already tilting sharply leftward. In 1994, Gill created the tax-exempt Gill Foundation and, ten years later, the Gill Action Fund, the former in response to a 1992 ordinance, Colorado Amendment 2, which blocked the application of antidiscrimination laws to gays and lesbians. Thanks to the massive success of QuarkXPress, Gill was able to sink more and more money into gay rights causes, which included founding the Gay & Lesbian Fund of Colorado in 1996.
In 2000, Gill sold his 50% holdings in Quark for around $500 million, exiting the company to devote nearly all his time (and money) to the gay-lesbian agenda via his foundation. This included creating Connexion.org in 2003 to serve as a vehicle for engaging gays and lesbians in political activity. Connexion.org closed in 2011; by then much of its mission and that of other “transformative” organizations was accomplished. Popular culture now viewed homosexuality with fascination, and the political universe was coming around. Gill would “marry” his partner in Massachusetts in 2009 after “gay marriage” was legally recognized there. Shortly thereafter, we began seeing the letters LGBT — now LGBTQ. (I have never been sure if the Q meant queer or questioning; the former seems redundant, as the word, once a slur, has been largely reclaimed, at least within that corner of the academic world devoted to “queer theory” and other such politically correct forms of life.)
Gill had created a donor club, OutGiving, which involved fellow multimillionaires who were either themselves gay or sympathetic to LGBTQ causes, coaching them in strategy, and in the most effective ways to distribute their vast resources. OutGiving thus enabled others to pour still more money into LGBTQ projects, especially those involving electing pro-LGBTQ legislators while targeting opponents for defeat. More recently in 2015, in the wake of the Trump-Pence insurgency, Gill and two other corporate multimillionaires created Freedom For All Americans to promote their issues across the U.S.
According to Rolling Stone, Gill has poured approximately $422 million into LGBTQ causes over a period of three decades — more than any other one person including George Soros. This money has been used to create an extensive network of state-level organizations. The Gill Foundation has bankrolled academic studies, and has doubtless been a force behind the rise of “queer theory” in academia. It has also bankrolled litigation, field organizing, candidates for state and local offices, and supported outfits often with tame-sounding names like the Coalition for a Better Colorado that, to an outside observer, would seem to have come out of nowhere, full-blown, and with plenty of money.
Via his network, Gill contributed more than $1.3 million to Media Matters, $733,000 to the leftist Citizens for Ethics and Reform based in D.C., $175,000 to the leftist Center for American Progress and $519,000 to ProgressNow. Moreover: “Gill’s fingerprints are on nearly every major victory in the march to marriage,” writes Kroll in Rolling Stone, “from the 2003 Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health case, which made Massachusetts the first state to allow gay marriage, to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision two decades later that legalized it in all 50.”
His Colorado Democracy Alliance, a collection of outfits founded in 2003 with three other leftist multimillionaires and structured to avoid campaign finance laws, flipped the Colorado state legislature from Republican to Democrat in 2004; a CDA-affiliated outfit with the Orwellian name Colorado Freedom Fund spent $500,000 to defeat a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Scott McInnes, primarily through negative ads. Gill’s activities have not been limited to his home state, obviously. He has flooded states such as Iowa and Pennsylvania with money “to stop the Rick Santorums of tomorrow before they get started.” In the former, his efforts led to the defeat of Danny Carroll, the Republican Speaker Pro Tem of the House; the latter, a much bigger target, cost him over $20 million, but in 2006 Santorum, whom Gill despises passionately because of past anti-gay remarks, went down to defeat.
Gill, who began as a shy, introverted, stereotypical tech nerd who shunned publicity, clearly became a master organizer promoting the LGBTQ agenda and targeting its enemies for defeat, which typically meant promoting Democrats over Republicans. His methods employed three basic principles.
First, instead of going national, focus on the state and local level. Writes Kroll again, “Congressional elections cost millions, but a smart investment of $50,000 in a handful of state races could flip an entire legislative chamber from anti-LGBTQ to pro-LGBTQ.” Kroll quotes Gill: “You go down to the states and all of a sudden you have those options…. They’re better laboratories, they’re more diverse and they’re a cheaper date.”
He learned this from a testy lawyer and former tobacco lobbyist named Ted Trimpa, a sort of leftist Karl Rove, also based in Colorado. Trimpa urged him to pay attention to less visible races at the state level where the majority anti-LGBTQ measures were originating. Their ideas, as they evolved, included identifying and neutralizing vulnerable candidates through direct action instead of working through larger and possibly more risk-averse organizations. This revolutionized his strategy.
Second, operate in stealth — that is, conspiratorially, using what has been called dark money. “Gill also knew,” Kroll continues, “his political efforts would never succeed if opponents connected him directly to the money. Stealth was key. The words Gill Action rarely appeared in a candidate’s campaign filings; instead, anyone who bothered to look would find an oddly large number of donations from Malibu, Denver, and New York, for a state senate race in Iowa. Gill’s team operated under such secrecy — avoiding the media and guarding its playbook …”
Rolling Stone goes on to note that in 2006, Gill Action helped defeat 50 of the 70 candidates it targeted. Four of 13 states where Gill Action operated “saw at least one legislative chamber flip from Republican to Democratic control.” Doubtless this trend was aided by gathering doubts about President George W. Bush’s disastrous war of choice in Iraq as well as an economy that remained sluggish outside of certain bubble-inflated sectors like housing — but Gill Action took the wins any way it could obtain them.
A third part of Gill’s personal strategy: be tenacious. Gill has been that. He does not give up. After being texted that New York State had rejected a gay marriage bill, Gill reportedly texted back, “That’s sad. What’s next?” What was next was Gill’s team creating a campaign they called Fight Back New York which successfully unseated three state senators who had voted against gay marriage. He set out, that is, to “punish the wicked.”
Finally, do not eschew bipartisanship — given that there are Republican corporate donors on board with the LGBTQ agenda. Gill has supported groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans. He teamed up with two Republican donors, hedge-fund investors Paul Singer and Daniel Loeb, to create the above-mentioned Freedom For All Americans in 2015.
This, though, is just more evidence that both dominant political parties have been thoroughly compromised: by lack of any moral compass but especially by the Almighty Dollar.
Now, Gill and his foundation are targeting the religious freedom movement, intended to protect Christians from business-destroying lawsuits by LGBTQ activists. For example, Republican legislators in Georgia introduced a religious freedom bill three years in a row. In response, the Gill Foundation launched the far-left Georgia Prospers. Its strategy has been to reach out to the business community. This is perhaps unsurprising: statistically, as natural denizens of “blue” culture many homosexuals are now better off financially than many heterosexuals. They tend to be tech savvy, the richest having business smarts that lead them away from too-visible “pride” marches and into efforts like we see here.
Thus big business now has numerous people who are either gay or lesbian themselves or highly supportive of LGBTQ causes because gays and lesbians have money to spend, because the cultural left has convinced them that “equality” demands their support — or because as part of “blue” culture they tilt to the left themselves. Georgia Prospers has thus gained support from Google, Marriott, Coca-Cola, and Delta Airlines, among other leviathan corporations.
Obviously Gill supported Hillary Clinton last year and believed she would win. He and his team regarded the Trump victory as a major setback, because even if Trump himself didn’t express interest in opposing the LGBTQ agenda (he even once referred to Obergefell as “settled law”), his VP Mike Pence was its most outspoken opponent in Indiana when he was governor there, and a number of Trump’s appointees are noted for anti-LGBTQ views (e.g., new Education Secretary Betsy de Vos, a multimillionaire in her own right who has donated to anti-LGBTQ groups and candidates).
Gill is taking the long view, however, with he and his network of groups continuing to work at the state level, e.g., to oppose such measures as North Carolina’s HB2. “We are going to fight this law in North Carolina,” he said, “and keep fighting everywhere until LGBTQ people are fully protected in every single state.”
Protected from what?
According to them, from discrimination — although increasingly, if a business does anything that can be interpreted as discriminatory on the basis of sexual preference and gets called out, it can face a massive lawsuit. It can also be given such a black eye in the now LGBTQ-sympathetic mainstream media that I am surprised anyone still dares.
Academia, of course, is eagerly seeking out LGBTQ people for faculty and staff positions!
Clearly, “equality” in practice means special favors — as I argued back in 1994 in my book Civil Wrongs which warned of the gathering dangers of not having opposed political correctness when it was still mostly limited to law schools and humanities departments but expanding rapidly. That same year I predicted that PC and Christianity were on collision course. Today, Christians trying to operate businesses choosing who to deal with, and not deal with, based on Christian principles, learn the hard way that they no longer have religious liberty in the U.S. Christian denominations are under stealth attack from the Gill agenda, continuing the road the U.S. is presently on towards a fully secular, de-Christianized, materialist society.
But mounting defenses of secularism is not part of the Gill methodology, which is about pursuing Fabian socialist style “penetration and permeation” to change Christian denominations from the inside. Consider this, from the Gill Foundation’s website regarding a donation to a leftist “faith” organization, one of a growing number:
“It’s no longer ‘God vs. gay,’ thanks in part to the work of Faith in Public Life, a national organization that’s changing the narrative about faith and LGBT equality. Focusing on the pulpit, not the pews, they educate and engage faith leaders to use their voices to advance equal treatment for LGBT Americans. And their national and state-based faith coalitions are sending a powerful message. Treat others as you’d want to be treated.”
Treat others as you’d want to be treated.
That sounds like a good idea to me. On such a basis, those who know me know I do not promote bullying or otherwise harassing gays and lesbians. We Christians have an obligation to preach the Gospel, however; and for all we know, kindness rather than acrimony might lead some LGBTQ people to Christ. So let’s turn this the other way. Would LGBTQ activists want to face massive lawsuits when they try to do business with people of their choosing? In the guise of “antidiscrimination” and “bullying prevention,” LGBTQ activists have become bullies themselves — typically with vastly more money than most Christians have!
Given these realities, I suggest that instead of Christian pastors doing what they have been doing (which is often nothing), they should study Gill’s career trajectory and methods, and employ them in forging a viable strategy of opposition to the LGBTQ agenda, to the extent it is still possible. Gill has been effective, and one cannot argue with effectiveness. It should be clear: Christians have a lot of catching up to do. I wouldn’t recommend relying on Republican politicians who can be voted out of office courtesy of one of these targeted campaigns if they haven’t already been compromised.
The most realistic political strategy is to fight fire with fire — or dollars with dollars. Christians who happen to be multimillionaires (surely there are a few out there!) need to wake up, smell the coffee, figure out why they’ve increasingly lost on such issues as “gay marriage,” and realize that unless they begin to use their money as effectively as Gill’s foundation and network of organizations have done, they will someday stand accused of a latter-day version of fiddling while Rome burns.
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