Another tale of rank homophobia in professional sports. Just two weeks after retired NBA player Tim Hardaway told an interviewer that he “hated” gay people, campaign finance forms from the 2004 election cycle reveal that Tom Ward and Aubrey McClendon, two of the owners of the NBA Seattle Sonics and the WNBA Seattle Storm, provided nearly 100 percent of the funding, over $1 million, for Americans United to Preserve Marriage a group run by professional homophobe Gary Bauer:

The campaign finance records I’ve reviewed show that Sonics/Storm co-owner Tom Ward has contributed $475,000 to Gary L. Bauer’s Americans United to Preserve Marriage.

And another Sonics/Storm co-owner, Aubrey McClendon, contributed $625,000.

Both men made their first contributions to the group, $250,000 apiece, on September 8, 2004 — the day after the group was formed.

As I said, the controversial group doled out $1,056,962 in the 2004 election cycle, which means Storm owners Ward and McClendon basically bankrolled the whole thing. Indeed, records show that between the 2004 and 2006 cycles the group spent $1.3 million total while Ward and McClendon’s donations total $1.1 million.

These same millionaires recently sought a huge tax break from the Washington state legislature:

The millionaires who’ve turned to this state’s left-leaning Legislature to authorize a $300 million tax subsidy for a new basketball arena have been playing right-wing politics. Two members of the new Sonics ownership group are heavyweight financiers of a national political group dedicated to banning gay marriage.

A spokesman for the teams’ owners said the two men have a right to their opinions:

“People are entitled to have their views, they are not views that I happen to agree with … but they are not trying to impose them on anyone out here,” [Jim] Kneeland said.

“I won’t argue that some of the owners may have more conservative political views than the norm out here; one of the things that they agreed to when they bought the team is that they would leave their politics at the state line,” Kneeland said. “They have done that. They were not involved in the election cycle out here last year and have no intention of doing so.”

It is a fact of life that gay women are among the biggest fans of women’s sports, so on a marketing level, at the very least, you’d think these bubbas would have more sense than to fund a group the sole purpose of which is to deny rights to gay people.

I doubt you’ll see too many gay women at future Storm games — in fact, the team is likely facing a boycott. As the man said, everyone has a right to their views.