California Family Council's leader gets rich off his organization

Looks like some California homophobes have been caught with their hands in the piggy bank:

Since 2003, the public has given the Riverside, Calif.-based California Family Council (CFC) nearly $3 million to support charitable work that the organizations says "protects and fosters judeo-Christian principles in California's laws." But, according to its federal tax returns, little more than $500,000 of that money has gone to "program services," or expenses directly related to that charitable work.

In contrast, the CFC's top two employees, including its founder and executive director, Ron Prentice, were paid a total of $1.1 million over four years. The CFC's other employees earned a total of $900,000 in compensation -- bringing the total spent on employees at the Council to about $2 million since it began in 2003.

According to the Better Business Bureau, 65% of a nonprofit's money should be spent on program services. The California Family Council was spending about 70% of its money on employee salaries.

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4 Comments

Is anyone surprised?

Bil Browning | September 11, 2008 9:49 PM
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I love the way the Family Research Council, its California namesake, and a number of other organizations employ the tern "Research" in describing their mission and efforts. For the most part it consists of determining which bit of right-wing dogma they want to emphasized today, and then employ their "scholary and peer reviewed experts" to point their microscopes to only pre-determined directions, with the uniform resut being, voila.....firm scientific reinforcement of their initial premise. They could have generally just published their dogma directly, saving money for the "research" machinations, and had even a greater percentage with which to line the pockets of their executives, all paid for with taxpayer dollars because of their 501(c)(3)tax exemption.

Don Sherfick | September 12, 2008 8:20 AM
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Thanks for finding that mistake, Don. It was the California Family Council, and I changed it.

And I don't think that the Family Research Council does any original research. I think they just reinterpret research that others have done.

Alex Blaze | September 12, 2008 8:31 AM
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Alex, great post! (As usual!!!)

So much of the Right's strategy is and always has been about making themselves rich. So as important as it is to get this latest revelation out there, Bil's right: no one should be surprised.