Chenoweth Defends Ties
If Congressman Larry LaRocco tries to tie her to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, Republican Helen Chenoweth said he’ll be making a mountain out of a molecule.
LaRocco pollsters last month began testing public reaction to a hypothetical link between Chenoweth and the controversial selfproclaimed Korean messiah.
But, interviews and a review of public records indicate only a weak link: Five years ago, a Moonsponsored political group contributed in-kind services to Wise Use, an anti-environmentalist group. Chenoweth has traveled to 44 states as a speaker for the group.
“I didn’t know that it had any help from the Moonies at all,” said Chenoweth, LaRocco’s opponent in this year’s congressional campaign. “Thank goodness they (the contributions) are a thing of the past.
“It’s not about the Moonies,” she said. “We need to bring the focus of this campaign back where it belongs and that is on the voting record of Larry LaRocco and the Clinton administration’s policies.”
LaRocco, who opened his re-election campaign with the charge that Chenoweth is a fringe radical, said voters aren’t comfortable with the Unification Church’s predictions that Moon will one day rule the United States. And he said the virulent anti-environmentalism and drive for increased corporate control over public lands advocated by Wise Use are unpopular.
“There is in my mind an alarming pattern of behavior and affiliation by Mrs. Chenoweth with groups that are extreme and out of the mainstream,” LaRocco said. “I think that even her supporters are going to be startled and shocked to see these affiliations, even as tenuous as she suggests.”
Wise Use describes itself as a loose affiliation of mining, ranching, logging and recreation groups seeking greater local control over federal lands in the West. Wise Use advocates mining in national parks and oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In Idaho, Boundary County and others have adopted Wise Use ordinances that attempt to limit federal agency control over federal lands. Boundary County’s ordinance was declared invalid in district court, though that’s being appealed.
Wise Use leader Ron Arnold of Bellevue, Wash., served on the board of Moon’s American Freedom Coalition in Washington five years ago. At about the same time, Wise Use accepted a small in-kind donation from the American Freedom Coalition.
But that doesn’t make Wise Use another of Moon’s activist organizations, Arnold said.
“They provided us with fact-checking services,” he said last week, estimating the in-kind donation was a maximum of 10 hours of work. “You’re talking, tops, 250 bucks.”
Arnold said the Moonies were not even a large enough donor to require itemization on federal reports from non-profit organizations like his. They haven’t helped out since providing fact-checking services for the 167-page Wise Use Agenda, published in 1989, he said.
Unification Church leader Tim Comey of Boise said the American Freedom Coalition’s support for Wise Use was minimal in Idaho, beyond organizing a few seminars on Wise Use topics. “It’s exaggerated, I think. There was so much momentum that the AFC was not all that needed.”