Court: Ex-extremist in charge of Christian charity

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A court ruled Thursday that a former fundamentalist Christian who was imprisoned for harassing the governor's sister before he renounced the movement is the rightful leader of a charity that provided legal counseling to anti-abortion protesters.

The District 4 Court of Appeals decided a messy fight for control of the National Civil Liberties Research Foundation, a Milwaukee group that helped anti-abortion protesters and others understand their legal rights.

The appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of David Kanz, a former Christian broadcaster who claims he helped found the group in 2003 and was its lawful president. A rival faction contended Kanz was not president and his control would effectively destroy the group and its mission.

"I'm thankful that finally it appears there's some end to the litigation," Kanz, 50, said Thursday.

Kanz served two years in prison in the 1990s after being convicted of filing false liens on property belonging to Catherine Doyle, a Milwaukee lawyer and abortion rights advocate who is the sister of Gov. Jim Doyle. Kanz was an anti-abortion rights extremist, and demanded she pay $100 million or repent.

After getting out of prison, Kanz said in an interview he continued working on behalf of the so-called Christian Patriot movement backed by the foundation. He said the foundation was teaching far-right Christians to file lawsuits "to clog the court up and try to tear it down."

The far-right movement argues that citizens can declare themselves above the law "by invoking arcane legal terminology," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which warned last year it was making a comeback.

Kanz said he walked away from the foundation in 2004 when he moved from Wisconsin to Georgia and renounced fundamentalism the next year.

He said he discovered in 2008 that the group was still operating under different leaders after another founder died and left hundreds of thousands of dollars in its bank account.

Kanz said he never technically resigned as president, and went to court to try to reassert control over the group and its assets to stop its mission.

"They were funding anarchy is what they were doing, and lawlessness, and I'm happy that is not going to happen anymore," Kanz said.

He said the foundation is undergoing a reorganization and considering a new mission, and that the board picked another person, who he would not identify, to be president.

Joseph Merkel, of Sussex, claimed that he had been the group's president all along, and that that Kanz was never president and had only been a hired consultant. He contends that Kanz filed the lawsuit after trying to negotiate a $250,000 legal settlement to compensate for lost wages for going to prison for harassing Doyle.

Waukesha County Judge Ralph Ramirez ruled in favor of Kanz before deciding the case's merits to sanction Merkel for what he called repeated violations of court orders. Ramirez found that Merkel had withdrawn funds from the foundation's bank accounts despite a restraining order and failed to comply with discovery requests.

Merkel called the appeals court ruling Thursday "stunning," and said he and others planned to protest outside Ramirez's house on Saturday.

"It's just incredible that, because we wanted to exercise our rights, he just gave the whole organization to somebody that it didn't belong to," Merkel said. "We were sanctioned out of existence without our case being heard."

Merkel said he believed Kanz was making false allegations about the group's mission to blame it for his harassment of Doyle. He described the group as "pro-life" and said it put on seminars to teach about the history of the law and how it relates to Biblical law.

Kanz said he has apologized to the governor, his sister and "everyone involved in that situation" that led to his imprisonment.

"I was wrong. I was dead wrong," he said. "Regret doesn't even begin to say how I feel about that."