PBS recently aired a 30-minute interview with Mitch D’Olier, retired President and CEO of Kaneohe Ranch Co., and before that President and CEO of Victoria Ward, Ltd. He continues to dedicate time to countless charitable organizations.

The interview brought out D’Olier’s best, but his admirable and tireless contributions to our business and nonprofit communities should not exempt him from questions on his controversial stance against gay rights. On that, he got a free pass.

In early 2009 he signed a letter to The Honolulu Advertiser opposing civil unions, saying they would constitute “de facto same-sex marriages.” Co-signers of that letter included Pastor Wayne Cordeiro of New Hope Christian Fellowship, Bishop Larry Silva of the Roman Catholic Church and Francis Oda of New Life Church and Group 70 International.

A gay marriage supporter celebrates passage of same-sex marriage legislation at the Hawaii State Capitol.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

More than a year later, D’Olier played a key role giving Gov. Linda Lingle cover to veto the Hawaii civil unions bill through his position on the Hawaii Business Roundtable executive committee. The committee — without first taking it to the Roundtable as a whole — released a recommendation that the civil unions bill be vetoed. Several large companies, members of the Roundtable, publicly disassociated themselves from the executive committee’s recommendation.

Subsequently, Francis Oda, despite being a co-signer with D’Olier of the anti-civil union letter the previous year, told Civil Beat he “did not know where D’Olier stood on the issue of civil unions.” That made Oda proof positive that the religious right is no less capable of disingenuousness than the supposedly sinful secular left.

As chairman of a publishing company, with gay employees like virtually every other employer, I know that promoting monogamous relationships — whether gay or straight — in turn promotes workplace stability. That’s good for any business and, by extension, the community as a whole.

Washington state’s business roundtable, in contrast to Hawaii’s, recognized this and came out in support of civil unions around the same time.

D’Olier has had a longstanding close relationship with the religious-right Hawaii Family Forum — which also has opposed legislation sanctioning emergency contraception for rape victims. (At one point HFF was even using D’Olier’s Kaneohe Ranch mailing address as its contact information.)

This year GOP state representatives Gene Ward and Bob McDermott led a push for anti-gay “religious freedom” legislation of the same kind passed in Indiana. Ironically it was the business community that pushed back in Indiana, forcing the governor to retreat.

If a “religious freedom” bill had managed to pass in Hawaii, how much of an adverse impact might it now be having on our tourist industry?

D’Olier and Hawaii Family Forum presumably supported that legislation. Do they still, after seeing how it imploded in Indiana?

Meanwhile, McDermott is making increasingly desperate attempts to challenge Hawaii’s new marriage equality law in the courts.

Do D’Olier and Hawaii Family Forum support these attempts?

In the interview, D’Olier said he places his family second to his faith. Since his brand of religion apparently teaches that homosexuality is a bad thing, how would he have reacted if, say, one of his sons had come out as gay and said he planned to marry his same-sex partner? Would he have distanced himself from that son in deference to his fundamentalist faith — which he ranks in priority ahead of his family?

(Here’s a quick story of an otherwise religious man who adamantly placed his family first, before his faith: He was a young Midwestern Catholic whose wife was experiencing a difficult pregnancy. His priest told him that if it could save the unborn child, he should be prepared to lose his wife. He in effect told the priest, “F*** the faith!” — his wife came first, before the unborn. There’s a happy ending to this story: both my grandmother and my infant father survived. But my grandfather left the church for good.)

You don’t expect aggressive questioning in local public television interviews. (After all, who’d go on if they thought they’d get a beat-down?) But it would have been appropriate to ask, respectfully, whether D’Olier still opposes our new marriage equality law and supports “religious freedom” legislation.

Being a religious zealot and a good citizen aren’t mutually exclusive. But while praising the latter, interviewers should also make sure we’re aware of the former.