[Mb-civic] Bush's Band of Brothers

Wed Aug 11 16:14:35 PDT 2004

Bush's Band of Brothers

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
 Posted on August 9, 2004, Printed on August 11, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/19497/

High-profile rock-stars and a large band of Hollywood entertainers are
pledging their time and money to help defeat President George W. Bush in
November. Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor, is looking to
the GOP's traditional base - fundamentalist evangelical Christians - to put
Bush over the top this year. Will a revivified and politically-focused men's
movement from the 1990s bail Bush Out?

In mid-May, when conservative organizations were heavily courting African
American religious leaders - to discredit the argument that same-sex
marriage was a civil rights issue - Thomas Fortson, the African American
appointed to lead Promise Keepers last October, eagerly joined the chorus.
"It would be a historical error to equate the civil rights struggle for
racial equality with the movement for civil accommodations based solely upon
sexual behavior," Fortson said in a letter of support sent to the "Not On My
Watch" committee, which was organizing a May 22 rally of African American
pastors on the steps of the Arlington, Texas, City Hall.

With the presidential election less than three months away, the Promise
Keepers, the men's movement that took the nation by storm in the 1990s,
appears to be shedding its carefully crafted apolitical veneer and jumping
into the political fray. While you won't find it endorsing a particular
candidate and jeopardizing its non-profit status, it has already weighed in
on an issue that the Republican Party hopes will help galvanize its base,
the Federal Marriage Amendment - a constitutional amendment banning same-sex
marriage.

"Fortson has been trying to preserve the organization's tax exempt status
while at the same time leading the organization into a massive
get-out-the-vote drive by inspiring their anti-abortion and homophobic base
to enter the political fray, and when they do, on those issues, they will
vote Republican," Al Ross, the executive director of the Institute for
Democracy Studies (http://www.cdsresearch.org  ), told me in a recent e-mail
interview.

"We predict that their entry into the social movement will be a wonderful
addition to what all of us are trying to do," Tom Minnery, vice president of
government and public policy at Focus on the Family, said. "If Promise
Keepers tells men that the protection [of the family] must now extend into
the public marketplace, into the government sphere, I believe many men will
pay more attention to these issues than they ever have before."

"Promise Keepers has always been disingenuous about politics," Fred
Clarkson, author of "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and
Democracy," said in an e-mail exchange. "While always claiming to be
apolitical, many PK rallies (although not all) in its heyday featured
prominent conservative politicians and overt political and even electoral
content. Denunciations of abortion and homosexuality were routine. It was
just a matter of time before PK developed an overt public policy agenda."

Founded by former University of Colorado head football coach Bill McCartney,
Promise Keepers has been chugging along under the radar during the past few
years. After its much ballyhooed October 1997 "Stand in the Gap: A Sacred
Assembly of Men" rally in Washington, D.C., which drew between 800,000 and
one million people, was carried live on CSPAN, and attracted an
extraordinary amount of mainstream media attention, the organization hit the
skids, experiencing severe financial problems which forced a number of
layoffs of paid staff.

"The organization lost some of its momentum a few years ago when Coach
McCartney resigned and it underwent some serious financial troubles but they
seem to be enjoying a bit of a rebound," said Ross, who heads the New
York-based research institute which specializes on domestic and
international right wing challenges to democratic values."Promise Keepers
had a phenomenal growth spurt for a few years after they were founded and it
took a while for people to understand that it was more than just a group of
men who like to pray together, but was a sophisticated political project
that preyed on identity crises which were affecting some men."

While Promise Keepers' financial problems sent its leadership back to the
drawing board and forced it to cut back on the number of large-scale events
it scheduled each year, it still managed to draw thousands to weekend
rallies at arenas around the country.

In early June of this year, nearly 10,000 men hooked up at the Pepsi Arena
in Albany, New York for the year's first Promise Keeper event. Each year's
events have a specific theme; this year PK events are called "UPRISING: The
Revolution of a Man's Soul."

"We're calling for an uprising in the hearts of men and expect them to go
back home and affect the culture, their communities, their families," said
Fortson, who is celebrating his inaugural year as leader of the 14-year old
organization. "It's time to get out of the arena and into the marketplace,"
Fortson said.

The "marketplace" that Fortson appears to be referring to is the public
policy arena. "I don't think we'll be able, as believers in whatever our
walk is, to sit on the sidelines, be able to witness quietly," PK spokesman
Steve Chavis told Family News in Focus, the news service of Dr. James
Dobson's Focus on the Family. According to Chavis the PK movement "will call
on men in every vocation to stand up and speak out in their field of
influence."

"We're very excited about seeing men get that Christianity out of the church
and onto the block, out of the church and into the board room, onto the shop
floor, in city hall and in the operating room," Chavis said.

"The radio ads for the organization's 18 stadium rallies scheduled between
June 5 and election day sound like US Marine Corps recruitment blurbs," said
Ross. "Their propaganda is slick and carefully crafted and it is not by
chance that the Chairman of PK is US Army General Alonso Short who served as
Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency."

"Karl Rove complained after the 2000 election that Bush got about 4 million
fewer votes from conservative evangelicals than he had expected," said
Clarkson, who has reported extensively on the Promise Keepers movement. "The
political mobilization of the Promise Keepers, if that's what this is, could
help pick up the slack. It seems to have a more ambitious season of rallies
planned for this year which suggests a possible election year up-tick in
activity combined with a more overt political agenda," Clarkson added. "PK
has not gotten much attention from the media and the political community,
which tend to have the nasty habit of failing to pay attention to trends on
the Christian Right."

Can PK's coming out of the "apolitical" closet effect this year's elections?
Al Ross thinks it could: "I am convinced that effecting the election is
certainly the organization's intention. They are an important part of
several of the religious right's initiatives aimed at turning out its base
in support of the Bush Administration, although its lawyers will insist that
it stops short of endorsing any candidate."