By Chris Badeaux
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 6, 1997

Who's afraid of the Promise Keepers?

Arizona Daily Wildcat Chris Badeaux

The Promise Keepers descended on Washington Saturday.

From the uproar, you'd think the Nuremberg Rallies had started again.

The Promise Keepers (PK), for those of you who don't know yet, are a group of men - only men - who have gone through the whole born-again thing and decided to commit their lives to God, so that they don't drink themselves into oblivion, beat their wives, cheat on their girlfriends, abandon their families and the whole 9 yards. Essentially, they're using religion as a way to clean up their lives.

A number of groups, the most prominent being the National Organization of Women (NOW), have accused the Promise Keepers of basically being out to turn America into a heterosexual, white-male dominated theocracy. These groups point out that:

The Promise Keepers have a number of tenets which run contrary to the inclinations of hyper-sensitive types which run like this: Men are the spiritual heads of their households. And, again, they are ALL male.

They are - the horror! - a religious organization.

The Promise Keepers descended on Washington, which means that they have a political agenda.

Good heavens, a political agenda? Good thing NOW has retained its objectivity by steering clear of politics.

Ironic as NOW's stance is, though, they aren't laughing. Much. They see a sort of right-wing, fundamentalist, crypto-fascist, cloaked revolution, with the Promise Keepers as the first wave of male chauvinist Bible-beaters who are, and this is a direct quote, "the greatest danger to women's rights." Adding more irony to insult, NOW is planning a counter-protest, to protest PK's march on Washington.

Did I miss something? Did a gender war take place a few years back and no one invited me? Why is male social responsibility automatically antipathetic to women's rights?

"Oh, but many of them oppose abortion," some might argue, and "they say things like 'Men are the spiritual heads of their households,' and they are exclusively Christian - in the sense that many country clubs used to be exclusively white."

Try this as an alternative explanation: We don't like their theology, we refuse to tolerate their beliefs because we are tolerant people, and their politics are not ours, therefore they are the living embodiments of Evil.

What groups like NOW overlook for some reason is that:

The Promise Keepers have made a deliberate attempt to expand their minority membership - and it's worked, since a lot of the problems facing white families are also present in minority communities. Thirty-eight percent of the organization's leadership is minority-composed.

The women associated with these men - their wives, girlfriends and sisters - don't have a problem with the rhetoric. In fact, a lot of men currently in the Promise Keepers are there because their significant others urged them in. Try this out: If PK is a fundamental danger to women's rights, then what's the deal with female support? Oh, and did I mention that Hillary Clinton has given them her verbal support?

When the Million Man - and the active word here is man - March went to Washington, the hubbub wasn't quite so loud as all this. Oh, sure, some people called Louis Farrakhan a racist for excluding whites, and a small group of feminists protested the exclusion of women, society has slowly come to realize that the point of the March was to address black male social problems. Yes, there is such a thing. Bill McCartney, the PK leader, has accepted the link between the Promise Keepers and the Million Man March frequently.

What the Promise Keepers advocate - what they say in public, which is all you can judge the membership by - is that it's time for men to stop being pigs.

No more abandonment of wife and child, no more domestic violence, no more rampant addictions, no more infidelity - in short, it's time for men to grow up. Isn't this what the political left has been yelling about for years?

Political speakers are not invited to PK rallies, none spoke at the Washington "Stand in the Gap" rally Saturday, and everyone in the PK leadership vehemently denies a political agenda.

Do the Promise Keepers represent some sort of resurgent Nazi tyranny? Probably not. Even if they did, this is a democracy. That means that the average citizen can say something like, "I love God, I love my family and I'm gonna start acting like it," especially when it's unpopular, without dragging the whole doom of the Knights Templar on themselves.

If they couldn't, well, gee, it wouldn't say much for the whole freedom of assembly and freedom of speech things, would it?

Chris Badeaux is the Opinions Editor. He keeps his promises.