P.K. in D.C. 1997
I went to Washington D.C. with the Promise Keepers in 1997. Patricia Ireland and her National Organization for Women were there protesting the existence of men. She would be on the news later that night saying that the Promise Keepers were the biggest threat to women’s rights ever. I listened to what the PK speakers had to say and was not impressed at all. I couldn’t help but think, “if this is the biggest threat to women’s rights ever then what’s the problem?”
Oh, what a pathetic display of political correctness disguised as some kind of men’s movement. On the ride up to D.C. with a van filled with men I had never met before I discovered that most of them didn’t know each other either. I also learned, from listening to our driver try to make use of the borrowed CB radio, that truckers get really mad when you call them “good buddy.”
Despite what you’ve seen in old ‘70s trucker movies, calling a trucker “good buddy” is not a good idea. It means, "gay lover.”
Anyway, after about 15 hours we arrived in a hotel in Baltimore, Maryland where we stayed. We took the train into D.C. the next morning.
Well over 1 million men were gathered there. We flooded over into the streets and all the way back to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I knew virtually nothing about the Promise Keepers, but I had high hopes and had come to see if this was a men's movement worth anything at all.
The Promise Keeper speakers had some guests come up to talk to us. A black man talked about being a hater of whites for years before learning about Jesus and renouncing his hate. Then an American Indian chief talked about spending his life in a Red Power hate group spreading hatred of white men before becoming a Christian and renouncing his life of hate. Then the 2 white men who appeared to be the primary PK speakers came back up to the microphone and told us that basically everything the man-hating feminists say about men is true. Yes, men are all wife-beating, cheating, lying, pedophilic monsters. Then they told all of us men to lie on our faces and confess to God that we abuse our wives. I watched as little elementary school boys around me lay on their faces to confess to God that they are wife-beaters.
While on my face I prayed, “God, what’s the deal here? This is a crock.” I don't think that's what the speakers had in mind, but it came from the heart so it must have been right, eh?
Then, as if the speakers felt the need to top their very feminist betrayal, they told us that all white men are racists and asked only the white men to lie on our faces and confess to God that we, and only we, are all a bunch of racists.
I got rather disgusted at this spineless display of self-flagellation and false-confession, being reminded by it of stories about the communists under Stalin encouraging false confessions from innocent people just before executing them for crimes that had never even occurred. I started to walk around to get a better and more detached view of this million-man circus.
I came across a female reporter equipped with either the most impressive and gravity-defying breasts I'd seen since high school or else expensive breast implants. She was standing in the middle of the crowd of 1 million men at the base of the Washington Monument doing her bit on camera. She must have been about 21 years old and was a major distraction from all of the PC bullshit. She seemed proud to draw the attention of every man within sight of her fabulous new breasts. I felt it would be a crime to deny her this hard-earned and highly-expensive attention, so I stood and watched until she had finished.
Eventually I wandered away from the fabulous reporter and her fabulous breasts until I came upon on odd site. The Lesbian Avengers were running up and down the street between the park and the Capitol building. They had taken off their shirts and wrapped the sleeves around their necks to make capes out of them. They were running around playing Superman with their very tiny titties out trying to get a Church Lady reaction from all the “Jesus men.”
What they got was something they seemed unprepared for.
There was a group at this large gathering of Christian men called Bikers For Jesus. They were ex-Hell’s Angels who had converted to Christianity. The Lesbian Avengers ran smack into the Bikers for Jesus in the middle of the street. They tried to wiggle their little chests at the biker dudes to shock them, apparently completely unaware of the history of these guys. They screamed mindless Marxist drivel and danced around, clearly expecting some kind of shocked "oh-face" reaction.
But the Jesus bikers started laughing at them. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. The Lesbian Avengers were so mad that they stomped their little commie boots and clopped off to shock someone else. Apparently the Lesbian Avengers never thought about the possibility that a bunch of ex-Hell’s Angels had probably seen quite a lot of bare, shaking titties in their lifetimes and wouldn’t be at all dismayed at seeing a few more.
I continued on across the street to where Patricia Ireland had gathered every single reporter in D.C. so she could preach about how evil men are for the cameras. She insisted that Christian men in particular are a threat to freedom and must be destroyed in concentration camp ovens as soon as possible. Or something along those lines. She really didn’t have anything intelligent to say, but it didn’t matter because it was all going to make the headline news regardless, whereas anything the surprisingly PC Promise Keeper leaders said would be heavily edited for maximum Dr. Evil effect.
After the big PC gathering was over we had to stand and wait for the train out of D.C. for what seemed like hours. Some of the guys had absorbed the PC bullshit like a sponge and were busily repeating it to one another, while the rest of us stood around contemplating joining the Bikers for Jesus instead. A woman came up to one of the PK guys and started talking in broken English about needing a man. “I need man. I need man. Oooh, I no have man. I need man real bad.” The PK guy she was talking to didn’t quite pick up on what was happening and thought she was down on her luck. Perhaps she just needed some money?
Yes, she needed money, but she wasn't necessarily a charity case. She was an imported hooker, only he couldn’t figure it out because she couldn’t figure out how to say it. It was a riot. Several of us started to laugh hysterically until he got upset with us. He demanded to know what was so funny about a woman in need? This made us laugh even harder. It took us awhile to penetrate the cobwebs and help him to understand what it was that she really meant by "I need man real bad."
He was more than slightly embarrassed after that.
Eventually we got our train out of D.C. and made it back to our hotel. On the TV news was the expected story, glorifying Patricia Ireland’s ridiculous claims of doom and damnation for women if they don’t all send their money now and join the ranks of the man-hating female supremacists, while not showing any understanding whatever of anything the Promise Keepers had actually said. Perhaps considering what they had said this might not have been such a bad thing.
On the drive home a few of us men who had been mostly quiet for the entire trip discussed a little bit between us how unhappy we were with the total crap the 2 white guys leading the thing had said. When we finally got back to Memphis I found a copy of the latest issue of the Promise Keepers’ magazine. On the cover was a picture depicting Jesus and the headline “was Jesus the first feminist?” Inside, it argued at great length that Jesus was the first feminist. I wrote to the author to ask him if he knew what feminism is, if he had read anything at all by Andrea Dworkin or Catherine Mackinnon or maybe Marilyn French, if he knew anything at all about the Marxist origins of the modern feminist movement and why that matters. He did not reply.
So I wrote to the Promise Keepers headquarters to ask them the same questions about the article. They simply responded that they had broken off their connection with that magazine, but stated no opinion regarding the article. At this point I decided to break off my brief connection to the Promise Keepers. It was not what I was looking for.
About a year later I saw an article by Cathy Young, currently of the Boston Globe, about the Promise Keepers and their odd inconsistencies. I emailed her and told her about my experiences in Washington, D.C. She responded that this was something she hadn’t heard about, but that it was consistent with all the odd things she had seen, such as a so-called debate between one of the founders of the Promise Keepers and Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. She said she had watched it anticipating some serious debate and worthwhile discussion, only to be shocked as the Promise Keeper agreed with every single hate-filled accusation that Eleanor Smeal made about men. He acted as a castrated doormat to her tirade rather than as an educated man of God or leader of any sort of “men’s movement.” We discussed the great abundance of oddities concerning the Promise Keepers back and forth via email for quite awhile before finally ending the conversation.
Since that day a number of intellectual Christian thinkers have been greatly criticized for raising numerous objections and questions of the Promise Keepers movement. I am no longer alone in my concerns. And most Christian men I know who are involved with the Promise Keepers simply ignore the leaders of the movement and do their own thing at their respective churches. As for me, I no longer keep up with the Promise Keepers, but I'll never forget the odd circus-like day I spent in Washington D.C. when over one million Christian men met a small group of topless Marxist lesbians.
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