Culture Of Life 101… “How To Organize A Pro-Family Group”

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For the complete guide to organizing an effective pro-family group, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

Part 2

When organizing a pro-family group for the purpose of fighting the homosexual “special-rights” agenda, you will eventually reach “critical mass” — you will think you have enough people to begin activism.
But you must resist the urge to jump into action immediately and instead take certain steps to prepare. If you go into action too soon and fail, you will do nothing more than embolden the special-rights movement in your area and make the pro-family movement appear weak and insignificant. No matter how desperate the situation, you must prepare properly beforehand, no matter how long it takes!
Building a successful and effective pro-family activist group is like building a house — if you spend sufficient time on the foundation, you will achieve your objective of building a solid and durable home.
After getting a group of people together, there are 11 essential tasks you must accomplish before you take your first actions. All of these are absolutely necessary. You do not have to perform them strictly in this order, but you should cover them all as quickly and as thoroughly as you can. This list of tasks has been used to establish effective pro-life and pro-family groups all over the world, and has been perfected with decades of experience.
These tasks are all really quite simple to accomplish if you have several good people working on them, and if you make sure that all of your new group’s members communicate with each other. Following are the first five tasks:
Task 1: Find a Good Spiritual Director. This is the most essential task of all, so it should be done first.
You will oppose homophile groups and individuals on the ground, but ultimately you are fighting Satan. The Devil will use every trick in his infernal book to try to stop you. You absolutely must have a good spiritual director to help you identify and defend against the Devil’s more subtle attacks.
Let your potential spiritual director know that you do not want him to lead the group or put a lot of energy or time into it. A typical priest just does not have time for this! You need him for spiritual direction and advice only, and he will not be obligated beyond this task unless he wants to be.
The priest you are looking for has spoken out fearlessly on difficult topics such as contraception, abortion, and homosexuality many times before. He has probably been slandered and ridiculed by the media, by homophiles, and perhaps even by some of his brother priests. Yet he carries on regardless, courageously defending faith, truth, and life.
He is the one you are looking for, and he will be greatly edified to know that there are people like you willing to join him in the fight.
Task 2: Begin Holding Regular Meetings. Most people don’t like to organize or attend meetings for a variety of reasons, but they are an essential task, especially at the beginning of any group’s existence.
At this early stage, you should meet often at a regular time and place, weekly or twice a month. Make sure that all or most of your people can attend on the day and the time you select, and keep this day and time consistent so people can plan around it. You can meet in a church rectory or classroom or even in someone’s house if there are just a few of you.
Make sure your spiritual director is present during at least the first few meetings — this is when his advice and guidance is most critical to your group’s spiritual formation.
Keep the meetings short and efficient, an hour or so if you can. During the first few meetings, you should discuss how to accomplish the remainder of these 11 tasks. Your agenda should be short, and stick to it. Don’t address tangential topics unless they are absolutely necessary.
You don’t have to convince the people who come to your meetings to be pro-family — they already are! Instead, you need to convince them to act pro-family, to get involved, to do something to battle the threat posed by the special-rights agenda.
At the end of the meeting, set definite goals for the next get-together, so people can think about them during the intervening time.
Task 3: Gather Intelligence on the Homosexual Groups. Like any other competitive group, an effective pro-family organization runs on information. The most important information is about its opponents, in support of the essential principle of warfare: “Know Thy Enemy.”
“Intelligence” is specialized information gathered about the opposition or potential opposition for the purpose of drawing conclusions and formulating your plans.
In a group of a dozen or more people, there will probably be one or two who enjoy doing research and investigation.
Intelligence that will be useful to your organization falls into two categories: 1) strategic, or general information on the homophile’s viewpoints and attitudes, the way they think, their psychology, and their level of morale; and 2) tactical, which is information on how many active people homophile organizations have, what resources they possess, where their money comes from, and who backs them. This is especially important if you are facing a local affiliate of a national group.
The best sources of intelligence include homosexual group’s newsletters and websites, bulletin boards at college campuses and radical and feminist bookstores, and, in some special cases, from the work of private investigators.
Perhaps the best source of strategic intelligence is the book by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen entitled After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90s. This book was written in 1989, but is still as relevant as ever. We often hear that homosexuals don’t have an agenda. Well, here it is, in lavender and white for everyone to see — a detailed strategy for using the media to propagandize the country into accepting all of the elements of the radical “special-rights” agenda.
Task 4: Elect a Leader and Officers. Before your group can continue much further, it must identify leaders and officers who have proven potential and who can work with each other. The process of selecting a leader must not be rushed. All efforts that follow will be completely useless if the wrong people are leading your organization.
You can identify leaders and recruit other members in several ways, including conferences, existing groups, the Church, and seminaries.
You should have a clear picture of the kind of leaders and officers you are looking for. Such people should be faithful, healthy, and energetic, and have a “battle mentality” — a willingness to sacrifice and do the hard work, and who realize that they will be in for a hard fight. They should also display at least the foundations of the most important leadership virtues and skills. These primary qualities are embodied in the acronym “MIKE” — Motivation, Intelligence, Knowledge, and Experience.
A new pro-family organization is going to need more than one talented leader. Although the president or director of the group is going to be the most critical to the success of the organization, the group must also have several other people who possess leadership qualities.
Task 5: Get Properly Trained. An unqualified person does not just pick up a scalpel and begin performing surgery, because he will mutilate or kill other people. He does not just pick up a weapon and go to war, because he will get himself killed. Nor does he practice law without training, because his clients will wind up in jail.
If we really believe that defending the faith, life, and family is “the most important work on Earth,” as Pope St. John Paul II told the founder of Human Life International, Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, we should act like it and get properly trained for the battle.
Since the fight over special rights takes place in an environment so radically unique, an improperly trained pro-family activist will make many mistakes before he gains sufficient experience. Pro-family activism is an unforgiving crucible that will destroy or defeat all but the best prepared and committed individuals.
The leaders of every pro-family organization should allow only competent members to speak to the media, participate in debates or presentations, contact homophile or uncommitted people, or take part in such high-stress activities as picketing and leafleting “gay pride” events.
The minimum qualifications defining “competency” for any pro-family activist may vary somewhat depending upon the situation, but every competent pro-family person should at a minimum be able to effectively refute the most common homosexual slogans, make an accurate and honest self-assessment, know the logical and scientific backing for the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, be able to avoid traps set by the homophile media, have a balanced personal life, maintain a professional attitude, and have a good sense of both the eternal and temporal contexts.