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October 1, 2004
"Montana Human Rights Network"
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Christine Kaufmann and Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network, and 2003 Leadership for a Changing World award recipients. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, October 1. Kaufmann and Toole will discuss strategies to fight hate crimes by promoting democratic values and public discourse. Read background Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Ken Toole and Christine Kaufmann of Montana Human Rights Network (MHRN) and a 2003 Leadership for a Changing World awardee.
Ken and Christine, can you give us a brief history of how you got involved in your work?
Ken Toole
Engaging social justice issues was a basic family value instilled in everyone in my family. My parents were active all of my siblings are active in various groups and organizations.
That’s kind of the value backdrop of what has pushed or motivated at least me to get into that work. But then beyond that I went through a process of working essentially on a volunteer basis for organizations that were involved mostly in environmental issues and, at the same time, got a wage-paying job within the state bureaucracy. Over time I got more involved in the social aspects of the volunteer work and was successful in getting my employment to dovetail with that. But the question is how do you do social justice work and maintain an household and a family and have health insurance when the social justice movement is so grossly underfunded in the U.S. In my personal experience it was going from positions that were “secure employment” and managing to maintain activity in social justice work and then managed to get into a position where I really could work within a nonprofit organization that was entirely dedicated to social justice work.
Christine: My family and my church held "service" to others as the highest calling. Over the years, I've had to revise, extend, and stretch that concept of "service" as it was instilled in me, but it is, nonetheless, it provided the basis for the social justice work I now do.
I did my social justice work in the early part of my career through church structures. As I began to see that those structures did not fit with me very well, I essentially thought I needed to take a break and did graduate studies in the environmental studies program in Montana. That really opened my eyes to the fact that there was a whole other world of social justice organizing that was not within church structures. So I found a place where I could move into the kind of work that I’m doing now.
Denver
What made you start MHRN?
Ken Toole
Between about 1984 and the formation of the network, I was working at the Human Rights Commission in the state of Montana as an investigator. We were beginning to see in Montana an increased presence of white supremacist groups, like the Aryan Nations, and I began to do some research on who these groups were, how they operated, how they recruited, and, as a result of that, became pretty convinced there had to be some kind of community activities that confronted what these groups had to say and began working with local communities in putting together community responses. And by 1990, there were a number of local human rights groups formed around the state predominantly in response to very specific activities of the racist movement. And we came together in our first conference and decided to form the MHRN as a network of these local community organizations.
And we really had several purposes. The first was to monitor and expose the activities of racist groups in Montana. The second was to work with the existing local human rights groups to help them strengthen themselves and provide programs for the community. The third was to work in areas where we knew white supremacist groups were active, but there wasn’t any community response, and organize in those communities. And finally, we all believed it was important to build a statewide infrastructure to pull all of that together and to garner resources for our work.
Boyertown, PA
I really don't associate Montana with progressive agendas. Was it difficult for you to be elected to the state senate and state house of representatives?
Christine Kaufmann
Montana has a long tradition of progressive activism. In the early 1970s, we passed what is arguably the most progressive state constitution in the U.S. Those progressive ideas have remained popular in Montana. In the last 15 years or so, we have fallen to some of the conservative ideals in the West. But progressivism is alive and well in Montana, and just eager to rear its head and take control once again.
Actually both Ken and I were elected to House and the Senate in Montana by pretty good margins, and we’re both facing re-election this year and believe we will be again. Our running for office was, in part, a strategy for showing Montana that progressives could run and win in the state legislature. It becomes much harder for our opponents to marginalize us when we can show that 55 percent of the legislative districts of Montana elect us to office.
Ken: The other thing about Montana is one of the dominant political forces since the turn of the century, organized labor, has had a big presence. The United Mine Workers Local No. 1 was in Butte, Montana, and our politics historically was dominated by the farm labor progressive alliance and the struggle with the big corporate interest, like Standard Oil. The conflicts between those large corporate interests and popular political organizations have always put a strong progressive thread in our politics.
New York
How do your roles as legislators impact your work?
Ken Toole
It provides credibility and demonstrates that we understand the process for getting political power. It also places squarely in the arena where public policy decisions are being made and gives us the ability to effect those decisions. Finally being elected officials provides us with the "Microphone and the pulpit". We are routinely asked for comment on a variety of topics because we are elected officials.
DC
Has President Bush's support for the Federal Marriage Amendment effected your work in Montana?
Christine Kaufmann
The marriage discrimination issue is playing out on the ground in Montana, but I wouldn’t say it’s not so much related to President Bush’s support as it is a carefully calculated agenda of the whole right wing. And that agenda is to divide us, to distract us from the more immediate issues that really are facing people and, in fact, contributing to the decline of traditional marriage, the economic conditions, the war in Iraq, all of those more immediate concerns that face people in America today. In Montana we do have a constitutional amendment proposed to ban gay marriages. It is very likely to pass and I think it is because the right wing has carefully crafted this issue for use in the political arena to bring their people to the polls, and create division in our communities. I think in the wake of these kinds of measures across the nation and in Montana we’re going to see a rise in hate rhetoric and violence against gay and lesbian people.
Ken: I do want to highlight that in some ways I think this is a cynical effort on the part of the political strategists on the right to energize their base. They do this much better than progressives do. So if you take gay marriage, fights about the Ten Commandments being posted in courthouses, the creationism fights in local schools, what you’re seeing there is, I think, a very effective strategy to agitate their base of support.
Fredrick, MD
When the KKK march thru town here, the media responds with articles that allow it to be seen as a one time "freak show". How do you go about making the community realize that your work is not a one time response.
Ken Toole
I think the question points out exactly why you need to organize local people in a more sustained effort to do educational activities. For example, if you have a Klan rally, obviously you want to respond to that, you want to rally people around that. And through that effort often you have the ability to create local human rights groups, which will be a smaller subset of people who are dedicated to a longer term of action than just that one response. And then it’s at that point you can become proactive and decide what other kinds of issues are important and related that you want to bring before the larger community.
For example, we have done community events that featured Barbara Ehrenriech speaking and she spoke about the right wing and economic issues. We’ve brought in activists from Columbia, labor activists, an agricultural person, a peasant organizer, to speak on globalization and U.S. foreign policy in small communities in Montana. We can do that because we have a core of supporters who have developed a similar analysis of issues that surround the activities of the right wing. And often the precipitating event that has brought people together has been something like a Klan rally or the Aryan Nation parade. The challenge as organizers is to bring people together and be sure to put that in a larger context.
Christine: I would say it’s not only the media that often dismisses these most overt far right incidents as fringe, we all tend to do that. We think that we shouldn’t give them so much publicity because they’re usually just a few people. Indeed they are usually just a few people, but their ideas are really in direct conflict with our democratic values. It’s important that we go right to the heart of those values when we’re organizing in communities.
Billings,MT
Because of the work you do and the public positions you hold -- how often do you feel that your owns lives are threaten?
Ken Toole
Almost never. Speaking as a white, middle-class male, I think that there are greater threats to people who are gay, people of color who are involved in political work, that there have been a few incidents over the time that I’ve been involved in this that it’s even been a consideration. A lot of people assume it’s a bigger deal, but there are very rare instances where I felt any kind of physical threat.
The goal of people making threats in this kind of work is generally to get you to shut up. And in the early days, we got more of that, not a lot, but we got some things sent to the office that were these veiled threats. I think it’s pretty obvious in Montana that we’re not going to change our course of action. We’re not going to shut up because of that. So I think that when you are vocal on these issues and people know you’re going to be vocal so that discourages them. They know they’re not going to get their desired results from threats.
Christine: I guess speaking as a lesbian who has been public in gay and lesbian advocacy work I have not experienced any specific threat. A few years ago, when a lesbian couple was targeted with arson, their home burned to the ground and they escaped through a window, I remember feeling a general sense of fear about being public and doing this work. But I think the important thing is that you name that fear and you refuse to be quiet and retreat. So on a number of occasions when I was asked to speak to that issue that’s how I handled it. This was not a specific threat in any way to my life. I generally agree with Ken the fact that it’s very rare that we feel a personal threat.
Atlanta
What has been your biggest challenge in doing this work?
Ken Toole
Sustaining it financially
Christine: To Ken's answer I would add, bridging the different "issues" of the progressive movement to move forward on a set of "values."
In the progressive movement, groups tend to be focused on single issues as they organize. You have environment groups, women’s groups, labor groups, gay and lesbian civil rights groups. The challenge is bringing that together in a multi-issue movement is very difficult to do. That movement needs to be based on a set of overarching values that we all agree with, but we don’t articulate well in a manner that could really be a driving force in this movement. On the other hand, groups like the Christian Coalition are not focused on single issues, but on a world view, a set of values that makes it easier to incorporate a movement of people.
Washington, DC
Are youth in Montana more likely to embrace progressive values than their parents? Or are those values just passed down?
How do you involve youth in your work?
Ken Toole
I think it’s hard to generalize whether or not there are different perspectives. Certainly there are youths that are very engaged in progressive work in Montana. We specifically are working with gay youth around safe schools projects, forming gay and straight alliances at the high school level, and that’s a very specific project that is very oriented to youth. In addition, the international work that we’re doing, the speakers from Colombia, the discussion about globalization, appear to have a younger constituent base than a lot of our other work.
Washington, DC
What are some lessons you've learned that can be applied to other areas, or even other movements?
Ken Toole
The importance of engaging the electoral and policy arena. So much of what we say we want it decided in the political arena. It is surprising that more progressive activists don't run for office. In part, our models of activism discourage that engagement. Certainly our methods of funding work to inhibit political activism.
LA
What do you see MHRN focussing on in the future? What's next?
Christine Kaufmann
I think we’ll be moving more and more toward an economic analysis, meeting people on the ground with issues that are bread-and-butter issues. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that economic human rights are on par with all other political and civil rights, and we don’t treat it that way here in the U.S. We have a right to a job that pays a living wage. We have a right to adequate housing. Those kinds of rights are not enforced here in the U.S. And I think there will be a continuing discussion among human rights groups about the lack of work by human rights groups on those particular economic human rights issues. That will, of course, lead us right into the electoral and political arenas because that’s where those kinds of things are clearly decided in our states and communities.
Ken: As a part of that and fitting within that is our interest in working on international issues and using that international human rights framework. And specifically in our work I think that means developing this relationship with human rights activists in Colombia and bringing those issues to local communities in Montana, those issues being globalization, corporate power, trade issues, and trying to point out how they fit and affect communities in our state.
Leadership for a Changing World
We're about out of time. This will be the last question today.
Ken and Christine, how do you sustain yourself and your staff while working on difficult social issues?
Ken Toole
Two things are important. First to allow/encourage people to take the work where they think it should go. That helps to ensure that people stay passionate. Second, encourage people to have some balance in their lives. Discourage heroic work schedules, allow time off, keep clear that our work is exactly that and understand that work is not all there is to life.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you again for joining us for today's Leadership Talks with Ken Toole and Christine Kaufmann. For more information about Montana Human Rights Network:
Christine Kaufmann
Ken Toole
Montana Human Rights Network
P.O. Box 1222
Helena, MT 59624
Phone: 406-442-3180
Email: ckauf@mhrn.org
ken@mhrn.org
Web: www.mhrn.org
Christine Kaufmann
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