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But does it matter?
Al Gore gets the nod from the AFL-CIO. But will it translate into strong support from the union rank and file?
By David Moberg
[10/14/99]

Nuclear spanking
The Senate rejects the test ban treaty amid partisan bickering.
By Jake Tapper
[10/13/99]

Pakistani purge
The coup in Pakistan seems to have wide popular support -- with the proviso that military rule should be temporary.
By Muddasir Rizvi
[10/13/99]

Coup d'état: Pakistan gets a new sheriff
The overthrow of Pakistan's publicly elected government may bode poorly for democracy, but who's crying?
By Alicia Montgomery and Daryl Lindsey
[10/13/99]

White men can jump
When Baltimore, which is 65 percent black, chose a white as its next mayor, it marked a watershed event in the evolution of America's racial politics.
By Debra Dickerson
[10/13/99]

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How about a craft fair? We'd pass out literature and sign up women who'd like to find out more about us. They'd come to our booths to see our decorative candles and jewelry and soaps. All showing off our organization's logo. It would be just like a Renaissance festival ...

Turner and her friends are not inviting women to join a church group or a charity drive. Instead, they represent the white separatist organization World Church of the Creator, an overtly racist and anti-Semitic group that is aggressively targeting women to join its traditional constituency of angry white males.

Experts say a newly stepped-up recruitment effort by this and other such groups targeting women is growing, especially on the World Wide Web, and that it is rooted in the standard business dictum: Grow or die.

"They need as many bodies as possible," says Randy Blazak, assistant professor of sociology at Portland State University, and founder of Oregon Spotlight, a watchdog effort that tracks hate-group activity. "Since more white women are working and therefore being laid off or competing with minorities, there is a growing pool of alienated people to target."

Nationwide, women already make up roughly 25 percent of hate group members, according to research by Kathleen Blee, a University of Pittsburgh sociology professor, but they also account for a startling 50 percent of all new recruits.

This is partly due to the emergence of educated, media-savvy leaders in the hate movement -- such as Matt Hale, the law-school graduate who heads the Church of the Creator. Hale and his ilk understand how to pursue growth strategies based on targeting demographic segments. Minority recruiting is out of the question for white supremacists. So women are now being recruited for positions of influence in organizations that previously restricted them to the roles of girlfriends, wives or mothers.

"Barriers are breaking down," agrees Jocelyn Benson of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC closely monitors the hate-group movement. "They're seeing shortcomings in male leadership, so they're turning to women to fill the void," she says. "It's gone beyond just bringing in some mothers and girlfriends. There are more professional women coming in. That adds legitimacy to their cause. It provides more access to money for their movement."

Church of the Creator's Lisa Turner, for example, herself a law-school dropout, says she is a catalyst for "intelligent" online discussions of gender politics within the hate movement. As one of her efforts, Turner posted an essay, Lessons from the Death of Princess Diana," in which she longed for a "White English Rose" to win over the masses for Church of the Creator. One of the more notorious members of the church was Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, whose shooting rampage in Illinois and Indiana last summer left two people dead and nine wounded before ending in Smith's suicide. In a subsequent media blitz, Hale disassociated Church of the Creator from Smith's deadly acts, but the gunman is still clearly revered inside the organization. In an e-mail written in September, Turner expressed regret at the "harassment and attacks" she said Smith had suffered from "anti-racists." She vowed to promote activist counter-efforts. "I am here for the long haul," she writes. She referred to the dead gunman as "Brother" Ben Smith.

Turner claims she currently has more than 200 women from a wide variety of professions and institutions on her e-mail list. Some are at such prestigious universities as Cornell, Stanford and Harvard, she says. "They're sick and tired of the propaganda dished out in their college classrooms, like the Holocaust," Turner says. "They ask me for advice. So I feel like a support system for women who are not necessarily ready to join Creator but are looking for a way to bolster their arguments and debates in classrooms with professors."

Several of the female Church of the Creator members recently recruited by Turner expressed in interviews a clear sense of fulfilled longing for the sort of traditional membership one would find in any club. They essentially had been "church-shopping" before committing to Church of the Creator. Turner was able to recruit them partly because, unlike other white separatist groups that had failed to even return messages sent to their Web sites, Turner was quick to reply to any e-mail she received.

"She is almost never too busy to help out, and she'll do almost anything to help out," says an 18-year-old student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, Calif., who identifies herself as "Sister Megan." "She teaches us that if we are ever to survive, information is key."

Melody LaRue, a 24-year-old office manager in Seattle, says she wasn't looking for "your average skinhead group," so Turner's focus on women made an instant connection. "There aren't as many women fighting for our cause as there should be," she says. "This is generally because the racial movement has been seen as a 'boys club.' The women in our church focus most of their efforts on changing that. To win over our people, we must be equal in numbers."

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