Anne Hendershott alerted me to the post at National Review Online about the funding George Soros provides to Jim Wallis and his organization/magazine called Sojourners.
Wallis is the de facto leader of the Religious Left coalition that does everything it can to aid the Democratic Party.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Any pretense of Wallis to non-partisanship was completely blown some years ago when he gave the Democrats’ weekly radio address on December 2, 2006 at the request of his old friend, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).
The funding from Soros’s foundation, The Open Society, was revealed by Marvin Olasky in World magazine. This is the same foundation that provided six-figure funding to Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. Both organizations are important Catholic voices in the Wallis-led coalition, and both have fully supported Obama’s pro-abortion agenda from the start.
Olasky must have touched a nerve. During an interview with Tim Dalrymple at Patheos, the usually placid Wallis launched into a tirade against Olasky comparing him to — gasp! — Glenn Beck:
It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living. I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros. Given the financial crisis of nonprofits, maybe Marvin should call Soros and ask him to send us money.
Wallis is denying he receives support from Soros even though Jay W. Richards, author of the NRO post, has screen shots of the relevant pages from the Open Society web site showing grants of $200,000 in 2004 and $25,000 in 2006. Dalyrmple posted PDFs from the Open Society web site on August 12 only to find they were removed a few days later.
Richards suggest that there is more to the story than appears to the eye:
There’s almost certainly more to this story, though. According to Sojourners’ 990s (go here and search for “Sojourners” in “DC”), their total assets went from $513,896 in 2002 to $4,615,468 in 2009. Call me skeptical, but I’d be willing to bet that this windfall didn’t all come from humble readers of Sojourners magazine.