Last week I made a phone call to Des Moines to ask a man about a Web domain he owns. The name is "Gorenfeld.com," much like my family's last name.

But a year ago a non-Gorenfeld seized control of the name, someone who dislikes articles I've written about a wealthy religious group with Washington dreams. That group is the Unification Church, whose activists Senator John Warner (R-VA) says "deceived" him into hosting an arcane ritual on Capitol Hill (as reported in the Washington Post.)

The senator-deceiving group has a friend in a surprising place: the Polk County, Iowa GOP, where one Mr. David Payer, a longtime Unification Church activist, serves on the Republicans' executive committee.

Maybe Payer felt that buying a journalist's name -- to protect a movement that Republicans accuse of tricking them -- would be hard to explain to friends in his party. That might be why he hired a special service, Domains By Proxy, to hide his WHOIS information, concealing his true identity.

I found out who he was anyway. (As this Metafilter thread discusses, DBP's service isn't very good).

When I said what domain I was calling about, he knew it was me before I could identity myself.

"Hello, John," he said.

I asked him whether he might be willing to hand over Gorenfeld.com. It had expired, but I was going to need his permission to unlock it.

"No, I think I'm gonna hold onto it," he said with a kind of breezy menace more often found in John Malkovich movies than in heartland party politics. "I want people to know a little about John Gorenfeld... I want to give you your 15 minutes."

A phone call to the Polk County, Iowa Republicans confirmed the role of Payer, a failed candidate for the Hawkeye State's legislature, in the party. Payer, a local businessman who runs the small ISP IowaLink, is also listed as registrant for the party's official Web site, PolkGOP.com.

He's also domain master for most of the Unification Church's major American Web sites, including FamilyFed.org and Unification.org. In fact, private investigator Larry Zilliox of Virginia, one of the only people capable of keeping up with the UC's bewildering maze of front groups, says he looks for Payer's name as a "red flag" indicating an entity's affiliation with this movement.

(The GOP did not return my request for comment.)

Payer was inspired to buy my name, he said, when he didn't like my reporting exposing the March 23, 2004 "Crown Of Peace" world peace ceremony at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. There, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon named himself humanity's new savior. As featured on ABC's "World News Tonight," politicians did more than just pay witness. They bowed down and wore white gloves, bringing to Moon a crown and flowing robes resembling King George III's.

The gentleman with the monarchial sense of style was no minor character. He owns The Washington Times and calls in favors from American presidents.

As for the Des Moines GOP's Payer: the man seems to be doing double duty in his Iowan quest to open doors in Washington for Moon, where the Reverend wants to end the separation of church and state. Moon's Iowa interest groups are registered to Payer, according to corporate filings. (Thanks to Blogesque and Runkle for additional research.)

Payer complained that I tried to make Moon look "odd." And in my fixation on the crowning, he said, I ignored the evening's spirit of love, in which local civic leaders received plaques.

"You gave it a perspective, or a view, that was cast so diabolically," Payer told me. "As if there was something do with becoming the King of America or something."

(In my defense, I went with the spin from a top Moon official, who wrote in a March 2004 memo: "The crowning means America is saying to [Moon]: 'Please become my king." The memo, later purged from the site, was reported in the newsletter of Americans United For Separation of Church & State.)

There's room on the Web for more discussion of what the Crown of Peace ceremony might have foretold, or not, for world harmony. I suggested that another Web address -- say, eDavidPayer.com or DavidPayer.us -- might be a great forum for his ideas.

"No, no, it's about you," he Malkoviched. "That's what it's about."

I can't wait to see what he comes up with. But do conservative voters in Des Moines know this is how their party works?

I'd appreciate it if someone would ask the Des Moines Register the same question:

letters@dmreg.com

Update: A reader, Mr. Gunnard Johnston (GZJJr@netscape.net), responds.

This post has been updated for clarity.

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