Promises, Promises . . .
I only intended to walk through town to get to the Air & Space Museum and buy myself a snow globe for my collection. Last weekend I was in D.C. for the Web '97 conference, and I thought I would see the sites. I approached the Mall and there before me was a sea of flailing, weeping men.Now I'm not one to pass
judgment on others, but the Promise Keepers scare me.
I didn't know too
much about the Promise Keepers' fundamental principals until I arrived home after the rally, but even without knowing, I knew enough. Their intentions seemed okay, but I could tell that no-good lurked beneath the surface. From what I can surmise, the promise keepers do not like women to work. They do not like homosexuals. They do not believe in abortion. And they believe that men should be the masters of the domain. This, to me, is scary.
Now don't
get me wrong, I'm not one of those ultra-feminists. I'm more from the Paglia-esque school of "if you've got it use it." Translation: I let men pay for me and I like to look sexy. However, I do get quite perturbed when anybody, even if it's unstated, questions my ability or the propriety of my functioning as an independent, intelligent woman. I don't have much "feminist angst" because It's never really been an issue for me. I have always been treated fairly based on my ability. But when someone tells me I should stay home and raise the kids and let the man in the house provide for me, I get nervous. I don't want to be a housewife. I can't even clean my own house let alone clean up after someone else. The Promise Keepers seem to think it's a privilege for women to stay in the home. To me that would be like being condemned straight to hell.
My
friend Marian thinks the Promise Keepers are just swell. She told me that she heard that the Promise Keepers wash their wives' feet and won't let them work and that that sounds fine to her. Well, I'll give Marian the benefit of the doubt because I love her and because she's English so she's used to having a frumpy old lady with 14 Corgis be defender of the faith, but I still think she's mistaken (plus I think she might have been joking)...but I know that there are people that actually think this way. I saw them when I was walking to the museum.
Another thing
scares me. The Promise Keepers were started by a football coach. So it's not like these people are disciples of Gandhi or anything. To me that's just strange. Are these men so hungry for spiritualism that they jump on the first bandwagon? Or maybe it's just because they can relate to football because that's what they watched before they found God. And furthermore, why should I feel compelled to entrust my well-being to a bunch of middle-aged men with beer bellies sporting t-shirts that say "Men of Integrity" and "Jesus will Save You"? They certainly don't look like they'recapable of taking very good care of themselves let alone anyone else.
And then there are the Promise
Keeper groupies. Now to begin with, I don't trust any organization that won't let women go to their meetings, just because I want to know what's so secret that I can't know about it. I mean, didn't you always wonder what Fred and Barney were doing at the lodge and what was so super-secret that Wilma and Betty couldn't do it too? But there are lots of women that don't seem to mind that they are intentionally excluded. And there they were on the sidelines at the Mall cheering the men on. Some of them were there under the guise of being "Event Volunteers" (I know this because they were wearing badges) which strikes me as particularly ironic. Here are a group of women giving up their weekend to work at a convention of men who don't want them there and who don't want them to be working in the first place. Weird.
Now, as I said, I am
not intolerant of people from other religions or backgrounds. In fact, I am Jewish and have many of the same complaints about orthodox Judaism, but there is a difference that I detect here. The Promise Keepers seem to feel a need to push their beliefs on others and to grow like a rampant fungus. Strength in numbers I suppose. But having also visited the Holocaust Museum while I was in Washington, this particularly scared me. Especially because the Promise Keepers appear to me (and I'm not alone on this one) to have a hidden political agenda. A religious right nation. Scary.
While I'm all in favor of being
nice to one another, can't people just do this without the need to congregate and get wrapped up in religious fervor? Proselytizing. Walking through this crowd having bibles thrust at me was creepy. As a matter of fact, the best thing I saw all day was a woman with a small sticker on her chest that said "abortion on demand." Nobody bothered her. I really wished I had oneof those stickers. If for no other reason than just to piss a few of those men in that frenzied herd off. But that's just me and that's a whole other story....More adventures in Washington: The Cool Site in a Day Competition