County GOP Locked in a Power Struggle : Politics: Conservative Christians have gained control of the party’s central committee. The old guard is attempting to oust the new chairman and his agenda.

The Ventura County Republican Central Committee has been taken over by conservative evangelical Christians, including six members who have been convicted of misdemeanors related to antiabortion blockades of medical clinics.

The committee’s new majority has wrested control of the party from the county’s traditional GOP leaders and insisted on resolutions that promote a constitutional ban on abortions, prayer in school and other political goals of the Christian right.

“They snuck up on us,” longtime committee member Bob Larkin said. “A lot of Republicans have gotten out of the party apparatus. All of the sudden they see their party taken away from them, and it embarrasses them.”

Ventura County’s GOP infighting reflects a power struggle across California where the conservative California Republican Assembly has recruited candidates to capture central committee seats in 36 other counties, the assembly’s organizers say.

It is also part of a nationwide effort organized by television evangelist Pat Robertson to train as many as 5,000 potential candidates for low-level political positions and then help them turn those jobs into a springboard for higher office.

“The people on today’s central committee are on tomorrow’s school board and city council and then on to the Assembly, Senate and Congress,” said Bill Jones, chairman of the county’s Republican Central Committee.

Jones also heads the Simi Valley-Moorpark unit of the California Republican Assembly and leads a chapter of the Christian Coalition, founded by Robertson after Robertson’s failed bid for President in 1988.

The quietly simmering conflict on the central committee boiled over last month when Jones made headline-grabbing comments seemingly in sympathy with David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klansman who is now challenging George Bush for President.

On Thursday, the party’s old guard will try to recapture some measure of control by ousting Jones as chairman and will try to steer the 28-member committee back to its basic tasks: registering more Republican voters and getting Republicans to the polls on election day.

“We have the votes to get him out,” said Gwen Tillemans, the committee’s immediate past chairwoman. “If the antiabortion people don’t like it, too bad.”

Jones has steadfast supporters who maintain that he is a victim of the press or of the county’s wealthy Republicans who fail to follow the true path of conservatism.

“It would be a shame for Bill Jones to be removed from office based on a scurrilous newspaper report,” said Delores Dautremont, a committee member. “I think most people on the committee are too decent to be party to a lynching.”

Steve Frank, a political consultant in Simi Valley and adviser to Jones, said the old guard is simply frustrated because the committee has slipped from its grip. “I see this fight as one of grass-roots conservatives, blue-collar and young Republicans against the country club set.”

Among the new leaders dominating the central committee are six people who have been convicted of misdemeanor crimes committed during demonstrations at clinics that perform abortions. They are Loren G. Broyles, Lee Casey, Clara Jean Davis, Ronald W. Lawson, Pauline R. Warren and Linda L. Vahl.

Despite Jones’ supporters on the committee, the sentiment of the party’s mainstream members appears to be solidifying against him.

The Ventura County Federation of Republican Women, an umbrella organization for 13 groups with 1,000 volunteers, passed a resolution condemning Jones for “his admiration and support for David Duke” and urged the central committee to remove him as chairman. Tillemans is president of the federation. She also has a vote on the central committee as the representative of Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura).

Furthermore, the central committee is expected to run out of money shortly after the new year. For the most part, the conservative Christian majority does not have the money or ties to wealthy Republicans to bankroll the committee.

“We are very ordinary, middle-class, trying to affect a system that has been in the control of a very small, moneyed elite,” said Warren, a committee member from Oxnard.

Many traditional donors have withheld their annual checks and will not resume their contributions until they get a sign from longtime GOP members that the committee is finished wrangling over emotional issues and has returned to basic campaign work, said Larkin, a leading Jones critic on the committee.

“If they bankrupt the committee and destroy it, it will not help them get started in politics,” he said. Larkin established the Lincoln Club of Ventura County earlier this year. It has collected $12,000 in donations, some of which otherwise would have gone to the central committee, Larkin said.

Of all the issues, abortion is the most contentious facing the committee. The Christian right majority has pressed the committee to adopt a resolution on the matter, an effort vigorously fought by those who don’t want to turn off Republicans who support legal abortion. So far, the majority has fallen shy of the needed two-thirds vote.

Lee Casey of Oxnard, an outspoken committee member, said the holdouts appear foolish for not going on record as opposing abortion and setting other moral standards--something she says is needed to entice more people to register as Republicans.

“These people are not conservatives but people who support homosexual rights,” she said of the old guard. “These are Pete Wilson Republicans.”

But traditional party leaders, including many elected officials, do not want to exclude anyone from the party as it continues its recent growth.

Hunt Braly, chief of staff for state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), said the committee’s neophyte leaders “are trying to impose a one-issue litmus test on every Republican in Ventura County.”

“I don’t know anyone who says they shouldn’t be in the Republican Party,” he said. “But they say that people who don’t agree with them should be kicked out.”

The new members of the central committee came to power at the beginning of this year, after Jones, Frank and committee member Richard B. Lawson of Thousand Oaks encouraged conservative Christians and antiabortion activists to run for the seats that often go begging for applicants, members said.

Michael Schroeder, an Irvine attorney who heads the 6,000-member California Republican Assembly, said his group put together slates of candidates and sent out mailers to help get them elected. In Ventura County, those mailers went to members of selected churches and other organizations.

“We have a lot of ex-Robertson folks in the organization,” he said, referring to those who worked on Robertson’s presidential campaign. “The CRA is the only organization that is antiabortion and pro family values.”

At least five committee members belong to the Eagle Forum, a conservative Christian group founded by Phyllis Schlafly. An even greater number have been associated with antiabortion protests, including Operation Rescue blockades of medical clinics that perform abortions.

Committee members Casey, Pauline Warren, Linda Vahl and Clara Jean Davis of Camarillo were among the 240 demonstrators arrested at a Family Planning Associates medical clinic in Los Angeles on April 14, 1990. The demonstrators, according to a police report, blocked the sidewalk and entrance to the clinic. They locked arms and refused to leave after repeated warnings.

Juries convicted three of the women of misdemeanor crimes such as trespassing, obstructing a public place or unlawful assembly, court records show. Casey pleaded no contest to trespassing. Each of them spent at least two days in jail.

In a note to the judge, Vahl said she was on the Republican Central Committee and active in the PTA and other community affairs “because I love children. . . . I dislike the fact that Planned Parenthood has taken away parental rights (and) the innocence of our youth who should be saving sex for marriage.”

Vahl said she has no apologies for breaking the law. “I’ve never gotten arrested for anything other than saving babies, so my conscious is clear.”

After she was released from jail, Warren sent a letter to the judge to apologize for her “arrogant and disrespectful attitude before you the day of sentencing.” She attached a picture postcard of the head of a fetus being held by forceps, with the message: “Please free these brave women who are being jailed for trying to prevent this!”

Committee member Lawson of Ventura pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct after he was arrested for blocking a Family Planning Clinic in East Los Angeles on Feb. 9. Lawson was placed on probation for two years. He did not return phone calls.

Committee member Loren G. Broyles of Ventura was arrested with 16 others during a sit-in demonstration at the Family Planning Clinic in Ventura on July 27, 1989. Broyles was sentenced to 10 days in jail and fined $775 after being convicted of trespassing and failure to disperse.

Broyles said he has not served any jail time because his attorney is appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. “I wish I could devote full time to this,” he said. “When you think about human lives being slaughtered . . . .”

But, he said, “the law comes down on you so hard. My first priority is to my family. I’ve got two young kids.” Broyles said he is due back in court on Wednesday.

The arrests and convictions of their fellow committee members does not sit well with some Republicans on the panel. They said the antiabortion activists have a right to protest but not to violate the law.

“I don’t believe that any group has the right to break the law or infringe on other people’s rights,” Michael Markey of Newbury Park said. Besides his membership on the central committee, Markey is a detective with the Compton Police Department.

Earlier this year, the new majority brought up a resolution to condemn Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates for the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King by four white police officers. A few said they had personal experience with Los Angeles police brutality.

Although it failed to pass, the resolution upset Markey. “It had nothing to do with Ventura County,” Markey said. “I left early, because I got mad.”

He was again embarrassed when Jones praised David Duke as “good for the Republican Party.”

“I work in an inner city, I cannot be connected to that kind of stuff,” Markey said. He said he will consider resigning if the committee does not get down to business soon.

Although bigger issues are at play, Jones’ survival as chairman is the immediate focus of the committee.

Jones acknowledges that it is a peculiar spot for the 42-year-old former computer salesman who is now starting to market nutritional supplements out of his home, a business he likens to Amway.

Jones ran for Simi Valley City Council and lost in 1986. Then he worked on Robertson’s presidential campaign. He said he helped organized 250 people to storm Simi Valley City Hall and demand that “pornographic” singles tabloids be banned from sale in news racks on Simi Valley sidewalks.

He said he has volunteered to work for the Rev. Louis Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition to warn schools about a Los Angeles high school counseling program for homosexual teen-agers, known as Project 10.

“We found out instead that it was a homosexual recruitment program,” Jones said. “Instead of getting counseling, they were simply referred to the gay and lesbian center, which was nothing but a bunch of homosexuals hanging around to pick up the children.”

Jones said he believes Project 10 has gone “underground” and he hasn’t heard much about it. “Now I think it’s called AIDS awareness. The money that is taken for research on AIDS now ends up in classes that are homosexual how-to classes,” he said.

Carolyn Leavens, a longtime county GOP leader, said that kind of thinking among central committee members is terrible for the party and does a disservice to the American people.

“They are trying to eliminate any information given at the school level,” she said. “These kids are going to end up pregnant or with AIDS or both.”

At Thursday’s central committee meeting, opponents hope to vote Jones out of office and replace him with fellow committee member Richard Ferrier of Santa Paula.

Although Ferrier opposes abortion, he has emerged as the most likely, if reluctant, peacemaker for the warring factions. “I am not ambitious politically,” said Ferrier, a tutor in the Great Books program at Thomas Aquinas College.

Members of both sides respect him as a thoughtful leader who can bring the committee together and perhaps work out some arrangement to share power.

“If anything, we are bringing life where it was boring and dead,” Warren said of the newfound interest in central committee activities. “The committee was boring before I got on it--the meetings were not even half filled. Now, I want to tell you we do not have a vacant seat. That’s excitement.”