Parental notice bankrolled by weekly's owner

He's the owner of one of the largest alternative newspapers in the country, a father of seven and a Vietnam veteran decorated with a pair of Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

He's also a conservative Catholic who attends Mass every day, teaches Latin to home-schooled students and rides the public bus from his Coronado home to his office in Little Italy.

But to understand what drives Jim Holman, why he has bankrolled two parental-notification initiatives for minors seeking an abortion in this state, you might want to turn the calendar to 1989.

That's when his weekly newspaper, the San Diego Reader, ran a series of ads with photographs of aborted fetuses found in a storage container. “The photos awoke me to the horror,” Holman would later tell a reporter for World, a conservative Christian magazine.

Before the year was out, he'd be arrested outside an abortion clinic in La Mesa. He was convicted and spent two weeks in jail for trespassing. “Under the circumstances, I consider it a great honor to go to jail,” he said at the time.

Now, it's his personal fortune that the 60-year-old Holman is putting on the line.

Since 2004, Holman has spent $3.5 million on parent-notification initiatives in California, far more than anyone else. Last year, voters rejected the first ballot measure, Proposition 73, by less than 6 percentage points.

On Nov. 7, they will determine the fate of Proposition 85, a reconstituted measure requiring that a physician notify a parent or guardian 48 hours before performing an abortion for a girl younger than 18, unless the girl receives a waiver from a judge or if there is a medical emergency.

Holman won't talk about his contributions, which come as checks, loans and free advertising in his publications. In a brief e-mail, he declined an interview, saying he wanted to stay out of the limelight.

“It's mostly because he's a quiet guy,” said Margi Pearson, who belongs to the same parish as Holman, Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Coronado, and also is active in the anti-abortion movement. “He's kind of shy, and being in the limelight just isn't his forte. He's not good at that.”

To Pearson and other friends, Holman is a hero, a man of deep faith willing to back it up with deep pockets.

“It's his commitment to life; that's his motivation,” said Danny Ramirez, an Imperial County businessman and longtime friend. “Jim really believes in his heart about his own salvation and what he has to do. He knows that this money given to him is only on loan. We are all going to go somewhere eternally – either to rest in peace or burn eternally.”

Advertisement But his detractors have other thoughts. They'd like Holman to step out of the shadows so voters can take the measure of the man seeking to enact the most dramatic change in California abortion law in decades.

“The dishonesty is in his covertness and his reclusiveness,” said Vince Hall, communications director for Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties and an outspoken foe of Proposition 85.

“I think the reason Jim Holman won't talk to the media or TV or to the public is that he recognizes his agenda is so far out of the mainstream that the people will dismiss him as an extremist,” Hall said.

Holman grew up in Monrovia, in a Catholic family of nine children, with a physician father and a stay-at-home mom, according to his older brother, William Holman, a San Diego attorney.

“He was the pebble in your shoe,” his brother said. “He was the conscience.”

Holman received a degree in government from Carleton College, a small, private liberal-arts school in Northfield, Minn., and served in the Navy.

In 1972, he started the Reader, working out of a Mission Beach apartment. Over the years, the paper amassed a reputation for taking on the establishment, with investigative writing and generally being a thorn in the side of movers and shakers. The San Diego Union-Tribune has been a frequent target of its wrath.

He left the apartment behind for a garage on Nautilus Street in La Jolla, then to a loft closer to downtown and so on – until arriving in the current headquarters on India Street.

According to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, the Reader averages more than 220 pages each week, with a circulation as of December 2005 of nearly 170,000.

“It's very unusual,” acknowledged Jim Mullin, who was editor of the Reader from 1977 to 1986 (Holman is now listed as the editor). “I'm not aware of another well-established alternative weekly paper whose owner follows Jim Holman's practices with regards to advertising.”

Among those practices: The Reader won't take ads for abortion centers, classified personals for same-sex relationships or solicitations for strip clubs.

“I have moral objections and also taste objections,” Holman told Editor & Publisher, a trade journal, about the latter category of “adult” advertising. “I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, and it's a business I didn't want to get into.”

On the other hand, the Reader's stories are an eclectic mix of narratives that include words that don't see the light of day in the mainstream media and tawdry commentaries – including a column about crashing parties. And while there are no “adult” entertainment ads, there are plenty of seductive women pictured in advertising for tanning salons and plastic surgery.

In the 1990s, Holman began putting out San Diego News Notes, a lay Catholic newspaper, along with three sister monthly publications – Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, San Francisco Faith and La Cruz de California. He started the News Notes to challenge a church hierarchy he believed was straying from orthodoxy.

“It seemed as though the diocese, for one reason or another, was not going to be firm on some issues, particularly pro-life issues,” he said in a 1991 interview.

These days, News Notes is busy promoting the parental-notification initiative (“Help Pass Prop. 85,” read the front-page headline in the September/October edition). Holman also used News Notes to collect signatures for the initiative, inserting petitions in copies of the newspaper and having them returned to his India Street address.

“We know who our audience is, and it's something we assume our readers are in favor of,” said Ernie Grimm, News Notes' editor.

The ballot measure has garnered widespread Catholic support. Kent Peters, director of the San Diego Diocese's Office for Social Ministry, lauds Holman's financial backing. “I would love to see Catholics more engaged on behalf of their values that way,” Peters said.

Holman's generosity isn't limited to this issue. Among his other political giving: $25,000 in 2004 to try to defeat California's stem cell initiative, Proposition 71, and $5,600 last year for the 2006 campaign to elect state Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Northridge, lieutenant governor.

Locally, he has campaigned vigorously against certain downtown development projects – including the Convention Center expansion, which drew multiple stories critical of its financing plan and of the special interests that would benefit.

Gary Shaw, publisher of San Diego Metropolitan magazine, once complained that the Reader “reads like it hates San Diego's leaders and hates new buildings, especially ones built after Alonzo Horton. It seems to hate economic growth, success and people who try to achieve it, which makes the irony all the more peculiar because the Reader's owner, Jim Holman, has ridden the population growth of San Diego since the 1970s to become a reclusive, middle-aged millionaire living in Coronado.”

Holman's friends don't like the “reclusive” label put on a man who waits at the bus stop near his home wearing a windbreaker over his shirt and tie, and a backpack over his shoulder. Holman told World magazine that “the recluse label could be because I have not been interested in socializing with journalists and politicians.”

Instead, his commitments revolve around his faith. For example, he sits on the board of governors for the traditionalist Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula and Ave Maria University in Florida. The latter school is part of a new community being heavily financed by Domino's Pizza founder and conservative Catholic Thomas Monaghan. The project drew headlines after Monaghan said he wanted the town to reflect Catholic principles.

Nicholas Healy Jr., Ave Maria's president, has known Holman for several years. Said Healy, “You would not know from meeting him or spending any time with him that he's a wealthy man.”

Local politicians blistered by Holman's publications are reluctant to talk about him. San Diego City Council President Scott Peters declined an interview, and Assemblyman Juan Vargas and Rep. Bob Filner, who like Peters are Democrats, did not respond to requests for interviews.

As for Holman's silence over his financial contributions to parental-notification initiatives, Samuel Popkin, a University of California San Diego political scientist and well-known Democratic campaign adviser, suggests it's a double standard.

“I find it most ironic and hypocritical for a publisher to play the stealth game given the gotcha mentality of his whole newspaper,” Popkin said. “The Reader is out to get everybody every day. Everybody is dirty, all money is evil, and everybody who gives a penny to anybody has bought them. There is nothing but avarice.”

Hall, of Planned Parenthood, believes Holman is keeping quiet for financial reasons. “He wants as little press attention as possible paid to the fact that he's distributing an allegedly alternative newspaper to a lot of people who, if they understand where the profits of that newspaper were headed, would think twice before touching it,” Hall said.

Planned Parenthood is campaigning heavily against Proposition 85, as it did Proposition 73, with its various branches donating millions of dollars. The San Diego chapter has given more than $600,000 to the two campaigns.

According to the Secretary of State's Office, supporters of Proposition 85 have raised $4.2 million while opponents have raised $5.6 million.

The Courage Campaign, a Los Angeles-based liberal coalition, refers to Holman as the “Catholic Crusader of Coronado” and News Notes as a “rabidly religious publication that crusades against Planned Parenthood and homosexuals.”

Holman is using his wealth to impose his religious beliefs on public policy, said Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign and former state campaign chairman for presidential candidate Howard Dean. “I think he's the poster child for why we need initiative reform,” Jacobs said.

But Catherine Short, an Ojai attorney who helped draft Propositions 73 and 85, said the ballot measure is not about one person. “It's about parental notification and whether parental notification is a good idea or not,” she said.

“If you see what happens to people in (the) public light, the way they get savaged, I could fully understand the reluctance to expose not just oneself but one's family,” she said. “The next thing you know, there will be reporters running up to his daughters (and saying), 'If you got pregnant, what would you do?' ”

This article is supposed to be about Proposition 85. It is nothing more than a hit piece on Jim Holman who has given much of his money to have this Parental Notification Proposition pass.

Apparently,it looks like we are giving the opposition a run for their money.

Question: Who would not want parents to be notified when their underage daughters are going to have an abortion?

I would like to know just HOW exactly is Jim Holman dishonest and covert?

Question: Who would not want parents to be notified when their underage daughters are going to have an abortion?

Californians soundly rejected that no-brainer proposition last year, so the answer to your question is 'millions of adults in California.'

I would like to know just HOW exactly is Jim Holman dishonest and covert?

The art of the intelligent interview has all-but vanished. That's a natural follow up to what the man said, but I have to think the interviewer didn't ask it.

I find that when I pay attention and ask people specific follow up questions in conversation, they invariably get confused, then they stammer a bit, and then they sometimes get upset.

I remember speaking with a young adult here in Las Vegas a couple of years ago - she had quite a bit of body art on her. to each their own, but I asked her why she chose to get the permanent tattooing done. She responded that this was the way to express herself. I naturally asked her what about herself did it express, and her eyes widened, got a 'deer caught in the headlights' look, repeated her conclusion once and when I pressed for an answer, she got upset.

She was the one who said it was to express herself, but got very upset when she couldn't articulate what she was trying to express.

This is common these days. Shallow thinking.

Because he thinks that parents should be aware when their little girl has a medical proceedure. How much more dishonest can you get...letting parents know what is happening to their children, how utterly covert.

/s

This whole debate makes you think ---- The schools have to have parental permission to administer aspirin/tylenol to students, and we have to get medical releases from parents when kids go to camp and on school trips, yet a 13 year old girl can arrive at an abortion clinic and have her unborn baby murdered and ripped from her womb - without even a wisper to the parents (in fact, it is currently illegal for the medical staff to tell ole' mom or dad).

How screwed up is that?

And exactly what would such a clinic tell the parents if that girl were to have major complications and/or die on the table? "uh....she was in having her uterus scraped out, for...err...uh.... a science experiment...."????

Question: Who would not want parents to be notified when their underage daughters are going to have an abortion?

Californians soundly rejected that no-brainer proposition last year, so the answer to your question is 'millions of adults in California.'

From the begining of the article.

"Last year, voters rejected the first ballot measure, Proposition 73, by less than 6 percentage points."

Not trying to argue but the numbers didn't look right. Here is what I found.

Number of Californians registered to vote in 1998: 15 million.

15m x 6%= 900,000. Not even 1 million much less millions. Number of registered voters who actually voted is even less.

Source is http://www.calvoter.org/news/releases/statistics.html

6% was roughly the margin of victory on that proposition.

In 2005, 47.2% of the voters (3,676,592 people), voted 'yes' on the proposition that would have mandated parental notification for minors seeking abortions.

52.8%, or 4,109,430 people, voted 'no' on the proposition that would have mandated parental notification for minors seeking abortions. That's the 'millions' of Californians I was referring to.

Sad but true.

The margin was 5.6%, not quite the 6% referenced earlier.

http://vote2005.ss.ca.gov/Returns/prop/00.htm

"Only responsible, tax paying adults may vote."

I often tell my wife that the country really went down hill when they allowed women to vote. If looks could kill....

I've often thought that only people who have a real stake in running the country should vote. As we have it now we have to cater to every half-wit Tom, Dick and Harry that manages to stumble into the voting booth. Uncle Joe can't read? Aunt Sally doesn't understand the ballot? No problem.

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