WARSAW, Poland — Some 3,300 delegates engaged in pro-family advocacy were attracted to the fourth World Congress of Families in Warsaw to find additional resources for the social agendas they are pursuing at home.
Contact names, printed material, social research and connections with like-minded organizations give the advocates material they hope to use to influence delegates to the United Nations and their federal, state and local governments.
For Arizona-based Family Watch International, that means, in part, collecting names for a pro-family, pro-life petition that states the signers' goal of preserving parental and religious rights. The organization started the petition drive at the Warsaw congress and hopes to collect a million signatures. Talking with other pro-family advocates is getting that petition started. The rest will rely on the power of the Internet, with interested parties encouraged to sign the petition online at familywatchinternational.org.
Family Watch International president Sharon Slater said she has seen the power that face-to-face networking and the global computer network can generate, combining the voices of family advocates.
In 2004, a weekend plea to contact Brazil's delegation to the United Nations in opposition to a provision that would make the expression of sexual orientation a human right attracted 350,000 e-mail responses to the delegation. The effort may have swamped the delegation's computer resources while the incoming e-mail was digested, but the initiative succeeded.
"A lot of the work is just helping people get organized," Slater said from her organization's exhibit booth at the Warsaw event.
Family Watch's exhibit is surrounded by those of organizations that are engaged in similar work.
The similarities add ranks to the advocacy effort in important ways, she said. For example, the United Nations only gives six access passes to each organization.
"The more organizations there are, the more access there is," she said.
Add to that the likelihood that contact from more than one organization increases the chances individuals will decide to contribute their time or money to at least one of the organizations.
Groups that have the same overall interests are also likely to have individual passions or a depth of expertise that differs from another organization.
"That way each can focus on their own passion," she said.
Slater noted that many of the groups promoting themselves at the conference in Warsaw are ministries of religious organizations. Those that aren't, even if the members or leadership are religious, are more likely to gain the confidence of advocates from a different religious background.
The look and tenor of the Warsaw conference have been conspicuously Christian, though organizations from Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and other cultures are strongly interested in pro-family advocacy.
"We promote the right of religion but do not promote particular religious values," Slater said. "There is a delegation here from Thailand. They have a member who will be a U.N. delegate. She signed our petition. She was thrilled to find our organization because it was not tied to a particular religious sponsor."
The most inquisitive delegates at conferences like the Warsaw congress come from countries where a social issue that is new to them is more advanced elsewhere. Lithuanian delegates studying homosexual political issues, for example, were looking for statistically backed information that could be added to a faith-based position, Slater said.
The sponsorship ties are more evident at the World Family Policy Center at Utah's Brigham Young University, which is also present in Warsaw. Executive director Scott Loveless said his organization is effective in the pro-family advocacy arena because it contributes valuable social data. Under the larger umbrella of the worldwide congress, "people can find a full range of possibilities."
E-mail: sfidel@desnews.com