Touchy Issues Keep Leader of Right-Wing Group on Go

It was an odd pairing--the conservative Westside matron standing shoulder to shoulder with angry residents of a Watts housing project at a press conference to complain about gang harassment of Watts schoolchildren.

But it turned out to be a winning match. With encouragement from the right-wing American Assn. of Women, the Imperial Courts parents pulled their children out of nearby Jordan High School, then demanded--and won--the right to send them to other schools.

In the process, the Watts parents gained a public platform for complaints that they say had been ignored for years. The AAW got a chance to step out from behind its image as a group of crackpots consumed with pushing its “traditional family values” platform.

“I really don’t see anything strange about it,” said Leslie Dutton, the Santa Monica homemaker who started the group five years ago and runs it virtually single-handedly. “Every person who’s fundamentally a conservative would have to agree that we have to address the issue of education.”

Before the Jordan High parents’ protest last February, the AAW, a Santa Monica-based “research and education” group, had made its reputation with pugnacious protests against illegal immigration, pornography and homosexuals, whom they blame for the spread of AIDS.

Dutton, 48, a former public relations consultant and Republican Party activist, works out of a small, cramped office, lined with file cabinets, on the second floor of a Santa Monica building that she shares with her husband’s real estate business.

Her phone rings constantly, and the donated fax machine and copier hum as she works on the letters, press releases and news media kits that she fires off daily to newspapers and radio and TV stations across the country.

The AAW’s official-looking letterhead boasts offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York, but Dutton admits that the “offices” are really only sympathetic “correspondents” who keep her up to date on “family values” issues in their areas.

The AAW has no official members and no paid staff, only a small cadre of volunteers with missionary zeal dedicated to stopping the liberal incursion on traditional family values.

Dutton’s troops show up at county supervisors’ meetings, to shout down proponents of a bill banning discrimination against AIDS patients.

They hold press conferences to denounce billboards touting condom use, claiming that they promote immorality and promiscuity.

They hold raucous protests against a county plan to pass out bleach kits to drug addicts to stop the spread of AIDS, accusing supervisors who support the measure of siding with the “perverts.”

Through it all, Dutton maintains a genteel, gracious manner that bespeaks her training as a press agent and her many years as a grass-roots leader in Westside Republican circles.

“I’m used to promoting other people,” said Dutton, a former vice president of Hannaford Co., a public relations firm co-founded by ex-White House aide Michael Deaver to handle publicity for Ronald Reagan when he was California’s governor.

She uses traditional public relations tactics to promote her causes: releasing to the press letters written to public officials, threatening politicians with loss of support or recall and holding press conferences to announce that the AAW has filed complaints with government agencies.

The complaints often go nowhere, but Dutton knows that an official complaint is likely to generate news media attention, and that is largely the name of the game.

“Publicity brings awareness and that means public scrutiny, and that’s what keeps public officials on their toes,” she explained.

She knows that an important-sounding name, like the American Assn. of Women, carries clout, so she makes sure that the people affiliated with her put the AAW moniker to work.

When Artrey Sawyer called on the AAW because a trash-filled alley blocked the driveway behind her apartment, she was named to the AAW South-Central Los Angeles Residents Committee and filed--in the group’s name--a federal civil rights complaint about the garbage problem.

The tactic worked. City officials had ignored Sawyer’s complaints for months. But the AAW called a press conference at the garbage-filled lot to announce the complaint, and three hours later, city crews arrived to clear the alley.

When the parents in Imperial Courts met with Dutton about their problems with Jordan High, they were dubbed the AAW Imperial Courts Parent Advisory Board--complete with business cards identifying them as part of the AAW. Suddenly, politicians and school district officials took notice.

The AAW’s recruitment and promotion tactics have led some to accuse it of exploiting the people it purports to help.

“They’re very media conscious,” said Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who has also worked with the Imperial Courts parents.

“People like to think of whites as the savior of blacks. They capitalize on that. But until real work is done that looks at problems in a real way instead of prostituting the problems for the sake of media . . . that’s when we’ll have real solutions,” she said.

Even Dutton’s philosophical soul mate and former AAW comrade, Ezola Foster, agrees.

“Leslie started with very good intentions, but I think she began involving the community in things against their will,” said Foster, a black Marina del Rey schoolteacher who led the AAW’s minority outreach program, Black Americans for Family Values, until she split with Dutton last summer, taking most of the AAW’s black supporters with her.

“She wanted the Imperial Courts residents to appear before the Board of Supervisors to speak on issues they knew nothing about,” Foster said. “She wanted them to appear as part of a demonstration and press conference at a Republican gathering in Anaheim. They didn’t even know what they were going to the convention for, but they felt grateful to her.”

Foster complained that while Dutton did help the parents resolve their problems with Jordan High, she did not teach them how to handle future problems that might arise.

“They still wouldn’t know what to do except to pick up the phone and call Leslie,” she said. “They haven’t learned what agencies are out there to help them and how to use the system.”

The Imperial Courts parents refuse to be drawn into the bickering over Dutton’s role. Politics aside, they have come to like and respect her.

“We’ve been talking about these problems for a long time, but nobody would listen until Leslie came forward to help us,” said Gwen Johnson, who transferred her son from Jordan with Dutton’s help.

“I don’t know about her politics and all that, but she helped us, and I’m grateful for that,” she said.

In addition to helping arrange the transfers, Dutton became a benefactor of sorts for the housing project.

When a girl from Imperial Courts was killed in a drive-by gang shooting, residents sought Dutton’s help to pay for the funeral, and she did with a $680 contribution.

When Dutton learned that the project wanted but could not afford to field youth league sports teams, she collected $800 from friends and business associates last spring to buy uniforms so that the project could have its first summer league teams.

Dutton never publicized the contributions, but she beams with pleasure when she talks about the help she has been able to give the project.

“It was such a small amount, really,” she said. “But to see the lift it gave those kids. . . . Their parents couldn’t afford to buy the uniforms. That $800 meant the difference between whether they’d have teams or not.”

Her involvement has extended beyond the confines of the housing project. As her guests, the Watts parents have munched hors d’oeuvres at the California Yacht Club, lunched at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and attended AAW forums on immigration and AIDS.

“The women were so thrilled,” Dutton recalled, her tone like that of a doting parent. “They’d never been to functions like these, yet we were discussing issues that affect them, that are close to their hearts.”

Dutton said that kind of “enlightenment” is what the AAW is all about.

She launched the group as the American Assn. of Women Voters in 1984 to bring more women into the political process, she said, and to provide a forum for viewpoints that were not being heard on major issues.

“We were upset that the major women’s organizations in the country were purporting to represent the viewpoints of women, but they were only a small minority,” she said.

Her AAW newsletters, which go out several times a year to about 27,000 people, most of them in Southern California, are dominated by diatribes against the “homosexual lobby” and illegal immigration, which the group blames for “Third World diseases” and other assorted ills in this country.

They lambaste not just the typical liberal political targets but also conservative Republican leaders, calling Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana a “homosexual puppet” for his opposition last year to failed Proposition 102, which would have required doctors to report AIDS cases to public health authorities, and accusing Sen. Pete Wilson of California of pitting the elderly against the “AIDS lobby.”

But the newsletters also provide testament to Dutton’s long history as a Republican stalwart, carrying pictures of her at the White House with party luminaries such as former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger (at a “high-level briefing on national security”) and former President Reagan, whom she knows from his days as governor when she was a “hard, hard worker” in his campaigns.

She sidesteps questions on whether the AAW has a political agenda, insisting that its only aim is to involve more women with differing opinions in the political process.

“We’ve been called ultraconservative, and we’ve been described as a civil rights organization,” Dutton said. “Some people call us radicals. But I think it’s very dangerous to use labels. . . . We’re involved in social issues that transcend all labels.”

Some of the AAW’s opponents do use labels to describe members, among them “fanatics” (by a Los Angeles County Medical Assn. spokesman), “crackpots” (by a blood bank official) and “off the wall” (by a Republican politician).

Some Republican leaders privately call the group a right-wing fringe faction, but others caution that the AAW--while small in numbers--may represent widely held views.

“Leslie’s very knowledgeable about her issues,” said Esther Rushford Greene, deputy director of the state Employment Development Department, who let Dutton list her as a board member “for visibility” when the AAW was founded, but has never been involved with the group.

“I don’t think we should discredit her at all,” Greene said. “She says things that I think some of us are afraid to say. . . . That makes all of us uncomfortable, but I think it’s wrong to dismiss her.”