AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (ABP) — Sponsors of an international gathering of conservative pro-family advocates in the Netherlands vowed they would not be intimidated after vandals painted obscenities and anti-Christian slogans on walls of the Amsterdam offices of the organization planning the event.
Officials said vandals defaced and damaged the outside of the EuroCongress building July 30. EuroCongress is professional organizer for the fifth annual World Congress of Families, scheduled Aug. 10-12 at the Amsterdam RAI International Exhibition and Congress Center.
The Congress, a project of The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Rockford, Ill., brings together organizations, scholars and individuals from more than 50 nations to discuss issues including abortion, marriage and home schooling.
Announced speakers include Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Dorothy Patterson, professor of theology in woman's studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and wife of the seminary's president.
Organizers said radical secular groups aren't happy with the decision to hold this year's Congress in Amsterdam. They quoted one feminist organization describing the Congress as "fundamentalistic" Christians who "will plead for going back to the Christian traditions of traditional relationship[s] between man and woman."
Larry Jacobs, managing director of the World Congress of Families, said it is the first time he has encountered such violence in 12 years of planning pro-family gatherings around the world.
"We know our opponents disagree with us on a broad range of issues, including: marriage, abortion, euthanasia, parental rights, pornography and prostitution," Jacobs said. "What's amazing is that these anti-family activists believe they have a right to engage in criminal acts of vandalism in an effort to intimidate those attending World Congress of Families V."
According to promotional materials, the Congress is "the premier gathering of pro-family forces from around the globe" with aims to "build the world's first pro-family movement."
Southern Baptist participants include Land, who is scheduled to address "The Role of Faith and Churches in Keeping Families Together" and Patterson, who is to discuss "A Modern Paradigm for Motherhood."
Two years ago Patterson's husband, Paige Patterson, gave an address at the World Congress of Families in Warsaw, Poland, in which he voiced concern about implications of statistics showing that 60 percent of college and university students are now female.
"One can rejoice in this availability of education for members of the fairer sex without missing the obvious," Patterson said. "In a few years men will increasingly be underrepresented among the intelligentsia and will gradually cede leadership in many areas to women."
Most of those women, he said, will give major focus to their careers instead of their families and children.
Other Americans featured on the program this year include Janice Shaw Crouse, director of The Beverly LaHaye Institute; Patrick Fagan, director of the Center for Family and Religion at the Family Research Council; Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association; and Glenn Williams, chief operating officer of Focus on the Family.
Amsterdam was host to part of a July 27-Aug. 1 general council meeting of the Baptist World Alliance, but most of the sessions were 40 miles away in Ede, Netherlands.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.