Here's what Connecticut's wealthy new culture wars combatant, who has begun injecting hate and division into Connecticut politics, had to say about gay marriage, after it was already legal in dozens of states and on the precipice of being sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gay marriage "promotes a very harmful myth about the gay lifestyle ... it suggests that gay relationships lend themselves to monogamy, stability, health and parenting in the same way heterosexual relationships do. That's not true," Sean Fieler told the New York Times.

Fieler, a New York hedge fund manager who moved from New Jersey to a faux French chateau on four gated acres in Stamford in 2018, is a top-tier Catholic political evangelist with a fat checkbook, spending many millions of dollars to fund anti-gay, anti-transgender, anti-birth control and anti-abortion movements.

He's funded campaigns to stop transgender bathroom use, as well as questionable studies vilifying gay parenting.

As a married gay man with plenty of gay friends parenting every bit as wholesomely and thoughtfully as most straight parents I know, I will admit to taking Fieler's harsh criticism and meddling in the way other people choose to live their lives as especially hateful.

It also strikes me as especially un-Christian.

Instead of complaining about the preponderance of poor young single mothers, why don't these rich funders pay for programs to help the single mothers and their children instead of campaigns meant to deny them access to the kind of birth control and abortion that privileged rich Americans will always retain?

Of course, so much of the big money funding political campaigns to stoke the cultural wars is done cynically, to fire up the Republican base and keep fannies in the seats under a shrinking GOP tent.

You need someone other than the expanding top tier of American billionaires to keep voting for a GOP tax-cutting, supply side agenda meant to starve government regulation and entitlement programs that might help both the middle class and the poor.

It's much easier to whip people into a voting frenzy by demonizing teachers and telling them schools are teaching their children that white people are bad, than it is to get them to rally around tax cuts for the rich.

But make no mistake, that's the primary intention of the GOP donor class: to lower taxes.

Fieler, who has been heavily invested in silver and gold mining, also has put a lot of money into the campaigns of advocates for using silver and gold as sanctioned legal tender. I feel a pattern of self interest in the giving.

Fieler has presumably found ways to make a lot of money. But he also has scored some spectacular business failure, with the closing of his Equinox Energy Fund in 2019, after losing 85% of investors' money.

According to a recent interview he gave to Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror, Fieler is planning to spend $1 million through a new political PAC that will concentrate on three Connecticut culture war issues: the teaching of critical race theory, sexually explicit curricula in schools and the participation of transgender athletes in girls' sports.

The cynic in me would suggest he's leaving his signature causes — against abortion and gay families — off the table here because he knows that it won't sell in moderate Connecticut. Time to demonize those who are left, transgendered people, and convince gullible white people that they are under attack.

Connecticut Democrats issued a scathing assessment of Fieler's new political interference in Connecticut and lambasted presumptive gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski for his willingness to accept help from "an extremist anti-choice activist and affiliate of anti-LGBTQ and hate groups."

Turns out, Democrats go on to say in their statement, it is Stefanowski's "failure to repudiate Fieler" that shows his true colors.

Stefanowski wavered when asked recently about transgendered athletes in women's sports in Connecticut, and neither rejected nor embraced the state's existing policy.

Stefanowski did recently rebuke former President Donald Trump for his insistence that he won the election.

I think he also will need to pretty quickly repudiate the hate Fieler is spreading in Connecticut on his behalf if he wants to appeal to the wide, moderate middle ground of the Connecticut electorate.

Otherwise, Connecticut Democrats will fairly and effectively weaponize against him the PAC Fieler means to use to help the Republican candidate.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com