Few Americans are aware that agencies within the
United Nations system are involved in a campaign to undermine the
foundations of society--the two-parent married family, religions
that espouse the primary importance of marriage and traditional
sexual morality, and the legal and social structures that protect
these institutions. Using the political cover of
international treaties that promote women's and children's rights,
the social policy sector of the United Nations--specifically,
committees that oversee implementation of U.N. treaties in social
policy areas and the special-interest groups assisting them--is
urging countries to change their domestic laws and national
constitutions to adopt policies that ultimately will affect women
and children adversely.
This
is a troubling agenda for an organization that proclaims, in its
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that "The family is the
natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to
protection by society and the state." The United Nations
historically has included in treaties and documents language
affirming a nation's right to determine its cultural norms and
practices. The U.N. Charter itself states that "Nothing contained
[herein] shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters
which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state
or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement
under the present Charter." And a 1960 General Assembly
Resolution states that "All peoples have an inalienable right to
complete freedom, the exercise of their sovereignty and the
integrity of their national territory."
But
the U.N.'s long-standing respect for the right of sovereign nations
to set their own domestic policies has yielded to a new
countercultural agenda espoused in U.N. committee reports and
documents, particularly those relating to the implementation of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Under the
auspices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, many of
these committee reports urge countries to:
-
Remove their prohibitions on
prostitution and eventually legitimize it; for example, a CEDAW
committee report on Germany--which has legalized
prostitution--notes with disdain that "although they are legally
obliged to pay taxes, prostitutes still do not enjoy the protection
of labor and social law [in Germany]."
-
Make abortion a "demand right"
protected by national and international law, with unrestricted
access for teenagers, and make the non-provision of abortion a
crime in all cases, even for reasons of conscience. A report to
Croatia, for example, finds "the refusal, by some hospitals, to
provide abortions on the basis of conscientious objection of
doctors...[constitutes] an infringement of women's reproductive
rights."
-
De-emphasize the role of mothers
and increase incentives for them to work rather than stay home to
care for children. The U.N. criticized the
republic of Georgia, for example, for "the prevalence of
stereotyped roles of women in Government policies, in the family,
in public life based on patterns of behavior and attitudes that
overemphasize the role of women as mothers." One country report even
criticized the observance of Mother's Day.
-
Reduce parental authority while
expanding children's rights. In 1995, a CRC committee rebuked the
United Kingdom for permitting parents to withdraw their children
from sex-education classes if they disagreed with the content.
- Encourage governments to change
religious rules and customs that impede its efforts. A report on
Indonesia states, for example, that "the most significant factors
inhibiting women's ability to participate in public life have been
the cultural framework of values and religious beliefs."
Indeed, with such language, social policy
agents working for and at the United Nations are promoting an
agenda that attacks the natural rights of the family and the
independent sovereignty of nations to determine their own domestic
policies on parental rights and the free expression of religious
values and beliefs. The U.N.'s CRC and CEDAW implementing
committees may insist that their recommendations are in the best
interests of children and women, but in reality they will greatly
expand government programs and domestic power and adversely affect
the future for women and children. The potential consequences
are extremely serious.
Rigorous academic studies show, for
example, that separating a child from his mother too early or for
too long risks long-term damaging effects on the child. Yet the
U.N. committees both disparage stay-at-home mothers and urge
nations to make publicly funded day care widely available, even for
newborns, so that more women can go to work or go back to work
sooner after giving birth. Many studies show that family structure
affects income, health, and happiness, yet the committees advocate
policies that will increase out-of-wedlock births, especially among
teenagers. Studies also show that children of married families that
worship have better incomes, better health, higher education, and
lower rates of crime, abuse, addiction, and suicide; married
families in developed nations also exhibit less violence against
women and children.
Evidence such as this from social science
research continues to grow and shows that the best environment in
which to raise healthy, well-adjusted children is the married,
two-parent family that worships regularly. Moreover, polls show
that a growing number of mothers want to stay at home to raise
their young children, but that if they have to work, they want
their children in family care, not government-run day care.
The U.S. Role
President Bill Clinton signed the CRC on February 23, 1995, but
the United States Senate has not ratified it, and the CEDAW has not
been signed or ratified by the United States. Leaders in Congress
and past Administrations considered both treaties too
controversial. Because it has not ratified these treaties, the
United States has not received a similar assessment of its policies
from a U.N. implementing committee. Nevertheless, under President
Clinton, U.S. representatives supported the general thrust of these
treaties throughout the international debate over women's and
children's rights, and became a major force behind the
implementation efforts.
That
support was demonstrated by the United States in 1997 when it
joined a U.N. voting bloc on social issues, a bloc that includes
Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The
Clinton Administration joined the coalition on very controversial
social issues in proceedings leading up to the five-year follow-up
to the 1994 Beijing World Conference on Women (known as Beijing+5).
The bloc voted to remove the conscience protection on abortion
matters for medical personnel and to legalize voluntary
prostitution.
The
Bush Administration and Congress must recognize that issues of
personal freedom and the rights of parents, peoples, and
institutions are at stake in every U.N. debate on social policies.
Rather than supporting how the U.N. committees are using the CRC
and CEDAW treaties to push policy changes that would ultimately
deconstruct the two-parent married family and counter traditional
religious norms, the Bush Administration should examine the
documents emanating from U.N. implementing committees, develop a
plan to strengthen the voices of U.N. members that oppose this
agenda, and take the lead in restoring the U.N.'s traditional
approach of letting sovereign nations determine their own domestic
policies on marriage, parenting, and religion.
Washington, for example, should urge
nations that signed the CRC and CEDAW to consider not cooperating
with the U.N. reporting system in these two areas. The United
States should assist small and poor nations that face reprisals for
taking this principled approach, perhaps by offering to work with
them to develop ways to strengthen their domestic laws to protect
their sovereignty. It should also work to establish a U.N. voting
bloc of those countries that want to protect and strengthen the
family, religious freedom, and national sovereignty--and, as an
ultimate recourse, refuse to fund activities aimed at undermining
traditional family and religious norms.
THE U.N.'S COUNTERCULTURAL AGENDA
The
nuclear family has always received special and honorable treatment
because of the value it adds to social order. In many of the U.N.'s
foundational declarations and treaties that are still in force, not
only is the central role of the family recognized, but the
inability of the state to replace the family's role in society is
acknowledged and religious freedom is stressed.
For
example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--in addition to
declaring that the family is "entitled to protection by society and
the state" --specifies that
"Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and
assistance." On its surface, at least,
this implies that society should enable mothers to nurture their
children and not push policies that would force mothers to forfeit
precious time with their young children to go to work.
Such
an understanding is also manifest in the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, one of two agreements to
implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It states
that:
The
widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the
family, which is the natural and fundamental group unit of
society, particularly for its establishment and while it is
responsible for the care and education of dependent children.
States Parties...have respect for the
liberty of parents...to choose for their children schools, other
than those established by the public authorities...and to ensure
the religious and moral education of their children in conformity
with their own convictions.
The
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the second
treaty signed to implement the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, states that "The family is the natural and fundamental
group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society
and the State." It also states that
"Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience
and religion...and freedom, either individually or in community
with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or
belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching." This
liberty, moreover, extends to parents' rights to choose their
child's education "in conformity with their own convictions."
Yet,
on the issue of women's and children's rights, the U.N. High
Commissioner on Human Rights has permitted committees and agents
under the U.N. umbrella to turn these principles on their head as
they communicate with the signatories of the CRC and CEDAW
treaties. These agents are targeting patterns of behavior and
social norms that have had the greatest positive effects on society
and the individual: marriage, motherhood and fatherhood, caring for
children in the family, chastity, and the special role of religion.
They have asked nations to change their domestic laws in ways that
ultimately will promote sexual activity among adolescents, increase
abortion and legitimize prostitution, and in general alter the
foundations of society. The sexual norms they promote, moreover,
are primarily those sought by radical feminists. They are becoming
the tenets of a new "moral" code against which all religions,
domestic policies, and cultures would be judged.
Reinterpreting Treaties and
Agreements
International law and the U.N. Charter recognize a society's
right to self-determination, especially when it comes to marriage
and the family. In democratic nations, sovereignty comes not from
individual rulers but from the popular will of citizens. The
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
state in their opening articles that "All peoples have the right to
self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine
their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and
cultural development." Yet the CRC and CEDAW
committees are violating such rules by modifying and reinterpreting
treaties.
For
example, in December 1996, human rights officials held a roundtable
in New York specifically to figure out how to modify existing
international agreements with regard to abortion and sexual
orientation. Their conclusion:
A
human rights approach to women's health creates an international
standard that transcends culture, tradition and societal norms.
Although these forces may bind society together, they cannot
justify value systems which perpetuate women's subordination.
In
other words, according to the social policy agents of the U.N., not
having full access to abortion, even for teenagers, is a form
of subordination that violates human rights. But there is little
reason to believe that U.N. representatives and bureaucrats know
better than individual societies how they should shape their own
cultures and laws on family, marriage, sexual behavior, and the
raising and education of children.
As
the excerpts from the country reports that follow show, the U.N.
committees have found a quiet way to subvert the sovereignty of
nations: by changing the meaning of international agreements. Every
10 years, and increasingly now every five years, the U.N. holds
conferences on the CRC and CEDAW treaties to reevaluate them and
change how signatories are to interpret and implement them. In
almost every case, the U.N. committees advocate interpretations
that are more and more hostile to the married family, the role of
parents (particularly stay-at-home mothers), and religious norms.
As far as the U.N. bureaucracy is concerned, the language of a
treaty is continuously in flux; even though the treaties were
negotiated carefully by the signatories, they can be continuously
reinterpreted to meet the goals of each phase of the new
agenda.
Giving Standing to Special
Interests
The U.N., through these committees, also undermines the
standing and sovereignty of nations by subtly promoting the status
of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that promote radical
social policies in meetings where treaties and agreements are
developed and interpreted and the strategies for implementation are
designed. At the 1994 U.N. Conference on Population and Development
in Cairo, for example, the chairman of the committee drafting the
conference document was the president of International Planned
Parenthood.
Such
standing complicates the objective process of formulating
international agreements and policies and weakens the role of
official state diplomats at the conferences. It also undermines the
ability and authority of state governments to make their own
domestic policy decisions. Australia has stepped out in front to
object to this type of interference, which gives special-interest
NGOs a way to outflank a government's exercise of its legitimate
authority. Australia recently informed the U.N. that it would no
longer cooperate with U.N. reporting systems because doing so had
enabled environmental NGOs in Australia to sue the government for
alleged non-compliance with a U.N. treaty in a matter that clearly
lay within the purview of the country's national
sovereignty--mining. Its decision to oppose the
U.N.'s encroachment in matters of traditional sovereignty provides
a model for countries that want to resist the U.N.'s new social
policy agenda.
UNDERMINING THE FUNDAMENTAL ROLE OF THE
FAMILY
To
most readers, the very idea that the U.N. might be involved in
efforts to denigrate motherhood and the married family sounds
farfetched. But few will be able to dispute the contrast between
the assertions about family structure that are being put forth in
U.N. committee reports and the mounting and contrary evidence
produced by social science research that fractured families produce
weaker generations of children. In the United States, the growth in
single-parent families, divorced families, and out-of-wedlock
births has led to more government programs to treat the problems
such weak family structures create. If the objective is to
increase state control of all functions of society, then the U.N.
approach makes sense.
In
the social science research, all family forms other than the
natural family in which children are raised by a married mother and
father are associated with higher rates of crime, illegitimacy,
dependence on welfare, and drug and alcohol addiction, as well as
lower levels of education, less income, poorer health, and lower
life expectancy. Out-of-wedlock births are associated with higher
risk of infant mortality, especially among teenage mothers;
retarded cognitive and verbal development; increased behavior and
emotional problems; and higher rates of juvenile crime. The social
sciences also document the effects of divorce on children, which
include juvenile delinquency and child abuse, increased poverty,
diminished social competence, earlier sexual involvement, more
out-of-wedlock births, and higher rates of cohabitation.
Despite such findings, the U.N. is not
pursuing programs that would help nations stabilize marriage and
strengthen families. Instead, the U.N. committees are pushing
policies that ultimately will weaken the married family. The
discussion of U.N. reports that follows offers specific examples of
this unfolding agenda, a compilation of the directives U.N.
committees have given nations over the past six years. Most of
these reports are instructions to signatories on how they can best
implement the next stages of the CRC and CEDAW agreements.
Undermining the Roles and Rights of
Parents
University of Chicago Nobel Laureate Gary
Becker concludes from his research that a woman staying at home to
raise her children makes a greater economic contribution to her
family and community than her husband makes by working in the
marketplace. While women in all cultures
have made great contributions outside of the family (in art,
literature, education, science, medicine, politics, and business),
women also achieve greatness by raising healthy and happy children.
The U.N. member states acknowledged this in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "Motherhood and
childhood are entitled to special care and assistance."
Yet,
in the recent past, the U.N. committee recommendations to nations
about women's rights demonstrate a great disdain for motherhood,
frequently dismissing the role as mere stereotype. Rather than
point out to member nations the fallacy of policies that jeopardize
the position of women who want to stay at home to raise their
children, U.N. statements denigrate the role of the stay-at-home
mother as unfulfilling and damaging to her own welfare and decry
national policies that support her.
The
U.N. reports instruct nations to eliminate, through legislation,
cultural norms that support the role of the mother at home. In the
name of elevating the status of women and reducing discrimination,
the U.N. committee reports make recommendations that denigrate the
standing of women as mothers. The reports recommend, among other
policies, that nations
A
CEDAW plenary session report, for example, recommended that the
government of New Zealand "recognize maternity as a social function
which must not constitute a structural disadvantage for women with
regard to their employment." It also expressed to
Ireland "its concern about the continuing existence, in Article
41.2 of the Irish Constitution, of concepts that reflect a
`stereotypical view' of the role of women in the home and as
mothers." In that article, the
constitution makes a clear statement of the importance of family
and mothers to society:
The
state, therefore, guarantees to protect the family in its
constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order
and as indispensable to the welfare of the nation and the state. In
particular, the state recognizes that by her life within the home,
woman gives to the state a support without which the common good
cannot be achieved. The state shall, therefore, endeavor to ensure
that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to
engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.
The
U.N. committee members apparently saw such a role as demeaning to
women. To overturn it, the CEDAW committee "strongly" urged the
government of Armenia, for example, to use the education system and
the electronic media to combat the traditional stereotype of women
in the role of mother. The committee also
criticized Belarus for the "prevalence of sex-role stereotypes, as
also exemplified by...such symbols as a Mothers' Day and a Mothers'
Award, which it sees as encouraging women's traditional roles."
The
following recommendations for less developed countries are not as
benign as they seem. Concerning Indonesia, the U.N. committee
expressed
great concern about existing social,
religious and cultural norms that recognize men as the head of the
family and breadwinner and confine women to the roles of mother and
wife, which are reflected in various laws, Government policies and
guidelines. It is unclear what steps the Government is proposing to
take to modify such attitudes....
This
theme is repeated in reports to other countries such as Croatia and the
Czech Republic. The message to these
countries is clear: Women should be encouraged to be workers in the
marketplace, not to stay at home to raise their young children.
The
U.N. is not just "concerned" about the elevated status given
stay-at-home mothers. It seeks to deconstruct the status given the
family by telling states to normalize out-of-wedlock birth; the
island nation of St. Kitts was criticized, for example, for "the
apparent lack of legal protection with respect to the rights...of
children born out of wedlock." The committees also
submitted reports encouraging some states to demote the status of
married fatherhood in public policy, institute massive transfers of
payments to compensate for the deficits of fractured families, and
change family law to eliminate the status of marriage regarding
property.
Step
by step, each of these recommendations seeks to change cultural
values and norms to weaken the standing of the married family in
society. Though children born out of wedlock deserve fair and
loving treatment, this does not mean that the importance of
marriage to the stability of the family, and the role of married
mothers and fathers in raising good citizens, should be diminished
either in law or in public policy.
State-Sponsored Child Care as Surrogate
Family
To help more mothers enter the workforce, the U.N. reports
insist that countries change their laws to ensure that
The
U.N. implementing committees consistently push for nations to boost
government-managed and subsidized day care, despite overwhelming
polling data showing that most mothers around the world prefer to
stay at home to raise their young children and research showing that
child care outside the home often has lasting negative effects on
children. For example, a recent analysis by the Canadian National
Foundation for Family Research and Education found that on average,
children in day care fare worse intellectually, emotionally, and
socially than their stay-at-home peers.
In
the reports on day care that the U.N. sends to less developed
nations, and even in reports to highly developed and rich nations,
the best interests of the child are never put forth as a reason to
intervene. To Slovakia, for example, the U.N. stated that the
"decrease in pre-school childcare is particularly detrimental to
women's equal opportunity in the employment market since, owing to
lack of childcare, they have to interrupt their employment
career."
The committee recommendation to Slovenia: "the creation of more
formal and institutionalized child-care establishments for children
under three years of age as well as for those from three to six." The
committee expressed disdain that only 30 percent of the children
under age three were placed in formal day care, while the rest were
cared for by family members and other private individuals.
The
CEDAW committee was direct in recommending that Colombia change its
domestic laws:
[A]ppropriate measures [should] be taken
to improve the status of working women, including through the
establishment of child-care centers and the introduction for
training programs, to promote the integration of women into the
labor force and diversify their participation through the
implementation of legislative measures....
Regarding Germany's policies, the U.N.
committee was "concerned that measures aimed at the
reconciliation of family and work entrench stereotypical
expectations for women and men. In that regard the Committee is
concerned with the unmet need for kindergarten places for the 0-3
age group."
The
public cost involved in subsidizing day care is least bearable
among underdeveloped and developing countries. Yet the U.N. CEDAW
committee ignores this substantial issue in its reports.
Expanding Children's Rights
If the U.N. committees have their way, the freedom of parents
to raise their own children, to shape their behaviors, and to
safeguard their moral upbringing will be a relic of past
centuries--despite such clear articulation of parents' rights in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the following:
"Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that
shall be given to their children." That almost all cultures
and religions have protected the time-honored role of parents in
forming the character of children does not deter the U.N. from
seeking changes in domestic laws to bypass parents on matters
dealing with their children.
The
U.N. committees are urging states to give minor children:
-
The right to privacy, even in the
household;
-
The right to professional
counseling without parental consent or guidance;
-
The full right to abortion and
contraceptives, even when that would violate the parents'
ethics and desires;
-
The right to full freedom of
expression at home and in school;
- The legal mechanisms to challenge
in court their parent's authority in the home.
For
example, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child recommends
to the Japanese government that it "guarantee the child's right to
privacy, especially in the family." Such a measure would
establish legal and structural wedges between parents and their
children in the home. Normally, when children rebel against their
parents, society frowns. Yet the U.N. is attempting to put in
place, in policy and law, structures that foster this type of
rebellion.
Among the broad "rights" of children
articulated in the CRC are freedom of expression; freedom to
receive and impart all information and ideas, either orally, in
writing, or in print, in the form of art, or through any other
media of the child's choice; freedom of association; and
freedom of peaceful assembly. The language of the treaty
could be interpreted to prohibit parents, for example, from putting
software on their children's computers to filter out pornography if their
children opposed their intervention. Once this "right" is embedded
in domestic law, children could easily gain access to legal help
from NGOs or government agencies to challenge their parents in
court.
Indeed, the U.N. committee report to
Belize recommends that the government set up legal mechanisms to
help children challenge their parents, including making an
"independent child-friendly mechanism" accessible to children "to
deal with complaints of violations of their rights and to provide
remedies for such violations." In other words, the CRC
committee is suggesting that the state create some entity to
supervise parents, a structure that enables children in Belize to
challenge their parents' parenting in court. Then the CRC committee
goes even further: Its report asserts that it is "concerned that
the law does not allow children, particularly adolescents, to seek
medical or legal counseling without parental consent, even
when it is in the best interests of the child." This statement illustrates
the committee's intent to undermine the authority of parents,
especially those who hold traditional religious beliefs or who
would disagree with the committee's radical interpretation of the
CRC.
The
definition of medical attention and counseling for adolescents is a
continuing area of dispute at U.N. conferences, as illustrated in
the preparatory commission reports and final conference
proceedings for such meetings as the
Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)
in 1994, the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995, the ICPD+5
conference in 1999, and the Beijing+5 conference in 2000. The
counseling for children is likely to include information on
abortion and contraceptives, regardless of parents'
guidance. The latest, most authoritative research published in
the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates
that opposition by parents to contraception for their teenage
children is protective and effective in reducing rates of teen
pregnancy. At the Beijing+5
conference, the clash between those who wanted to protect parental
rights and those who opposed those rights almost scuttled the
possibility of a final conference document.
The
U.N. committee's opposition to the freedom of parents to guide the
moral education of their children is made clear in a CRC committee
rebuke directed at the United Kingdom in 1995. The committee stated
that
insufficient attention has been given to
the right of the child to express his/her opinion, including in
cases where parents in England and Wales have the possibility of
withdrawing their children from parts of the sex education programs
in school. In this as in other decisions, including exclusion from
school, the child is not systematically invited to express his/her
opinion and those opinions many not be given due weight, as
required under article 12 of the Convention.
The
U.N. committee went even further in its recommendation to the
Ethiopian government, urging it to change its laws so that "the
limitation of the right to legal counsel of children be abolished
as a matter of priority."
Consider how direct the CRC committee is
in its advice to Austria to increase children's rights over
parents' authority: "Austrian Law and regulations do not provide a
legal minimum age for medical counseling and treatment without
parental consent...[and] that the requirement of a referral to
the courts will dissuade children from seeking medical attention
and be prejudicial to the best interests of the child." Austria,
like all nations, has defined the age at which the child becomes
legally independent of the parent. This effort by the U.N.
committee to make states define a different age for medical
counseling and treatment is targeted specifically at removing
parents' control over the moral formation of their children and the
parameters of their children's sexual behavior.
The
U.N. committee showed little awareness that Mali is among the
poorest countries in the world, with 65 percent of its land area
either desert or semi-desert. About 10 percent of the population is
nomadic, and some 80 percent of the labor force is engaged in
farming and fishing. Per capita GDP in Mali in
1998 was estimated to be $790. Yet the U.N. suggests that Mali
allocate "adequate human and financial resources, to develop
youth-friendly counseling, care and rehabilitation facilities for
adolescents that would be accessible without parental consent,
where this is in the best interests of the child." The
preparatory session leading up to the Beijing 1995 conference
illustrates that making "counseling" and "rehabilitation
facilities" accessible is "U.N.-speak" for giving government
agencies and NGOs the right to guide minor children toward abortion
services and counseling on contraceptives regardless of the wishes
of their parents.
The
overall agenda is to seek changes in the laws of each nation that
will weaken the freedom and authority of parents to direct the
moral education and attitudes of their children. Nowhere is there a
suggestion in the CRC reports to signatory nations that the role of
parents should be strengthened, even though most parents and
observers agree that raising children is becoming increasingly
difficult.
The
U.N. demonstrated that it is no longer a friend to parents in its
deliberate stand at the First United Nations Conference of
Ministers Responsible for Youth, which resulted in promulgation of
the U.N. Declaration on Youth in Lisbon in August 1998. During the
deliberations, the U.N. conference rejected the inclusion of a
statement about the role and importance of marriage, parents, and
families to the upbringing of youth. The U.N. stand prompted an
objection from the Vatican, which
repeatedly sought to introduce the concept
of parent's rights, duties and responsibilities to provide
appropriate direction and guidance to their youth, in a manner
consistent with their evolving capacities, a right enshrined in the
most significant international documents of this century....
Despite our best joint efforts...[the declaration] continues to
fail to take into account the vital role which parents must
play.... [T]here is no language currently in the draft Lisbon
Declaration as regards marriage and the creation of the family.
As
this statement makes clear, the omission from the declaration of a
statement about marriage and a parent's vital role in a child's
upbringing was not an oversight; it was deliberate. The U.N. agenda
is subverting parental authority and the standing of marriage,
regardless of the language in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
CHANGING CULTURES BY CHANGING SEXUAL
NORMS
For
society, the benefits of channeling sexuality and reproduction into
marriage are significant. Ironically, such a cultural norm ensures,
better than any reform, the reduction of violence against women and
children, which also happens to be one of the goals of the feminist
movement. It also ensures the lowest crime rates, greater social
cohesiveness, longer life spans, better health, higher levels of
education, and higher levels of income.
Yet
the U.N. actively promotes sex outside of marriage as an acceptable
cultural norm, and this agenda is made clear in its policies on
abortion, contraception, gender definitions, prostitution, and
pornography. The U.N. encourages governments to lend legal and
financial support to the effort to change long-held and wise
cultural norms. Whereas traditional cultures regulate sexual
intercourse by shepherding the act toward marriage, the U.N.
promotes unconstrained consensual sex coupled with larger social
insurance "safety nets" to address the problematic effects. If the
U.N. can change the sexual norms of youth, it can change the
structure of the family.
Resphaping Sexual Norms
Contraception for teenagers is a highly controversial issue,
especially when governments advocate access for minors over the
wishes of parents. Nowhere in the U.N.'s committee reports or on
its Web site does the organization propose abstinence until
marriage. Instead, the CEDAW committees repeatedly urge that
teenagers have:
-
Universal access to contraceptives and
abortions without their parents' permission, and
-
Access to medical counseling services
without their parents' consent.
- For example, the U.N. committee urged
Ireland to "improve family planning services and the availability
of contraception, including for teenagers and young adults." Yet, since
making contraception available to single people three decades
ago,
Ireland has seen its rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, sexually
transmitted disease, violence, and abortion soar. The
U.N. committees also give similar advice to other countries,
including Peru, Russia, the Maldives, Yemen, and
Macedonia.
The
U.N. committees have long sought the protection of abortion in
domestic law; but at the 1995 CEDAW conference in Beijing and at
the 2000 Beijing+5 conference in New York, enough participating
nations repeatedly voted not to include the protection of abortion
in the treaty, effectively removing it from the U.N.'s legitimate
agenda. Despite such a clear outcome, the U.N. implementing
committees continue to advocate a denial of parental authority and
instead advocate an expansion of state authority into this intimate
domain of family life:
-
In countries where abortion is highly
controversial, such as Peru, the U.N. committee advocates abortion
on the grounds of safety (though abortion is about four times more
dangerous to the mother's health than childbirth );
-
In countries where laws forbid abortion,
such as Mexico, the U.N. committee encourages the local and
district governments to "review their legislation so that, where
necessary, women are granted access to rapid and easy abortion." The
committee even urges the Mexican national government to "weigh the
possibility of authorizing the use of the RU-486 contraceptive,
which is cheap and easy to use, as soon as it becomes available."
- In countries where the constitution
forbids abortion, such as Ireland, the U.N. "urges the Government
to facilitate a national dialogue on women's reproductive rights,
including on the restrictive abortion laws." The people of Ireland,
however, already have rejected two recent referenda to change the
national constitution to allow abortions.
The
U.N. committee even goes so far as to attack freedom-of-conscience
provisions in national law. It has reprimanded Croatia, for
example, for the refusal by some of its hospitals to offer
abortions to patients because their doctors on staff object. When there
is a clash between traditional or sacred norms of personal freedom
and the new but radical "rights" promoted by the international
feminist movement, the U.N. committees target the old and true to
make room for the new. For example, the committee "expressed
particular concern with regard to the limited availability of
abortion services for women in southern Italy, as a result of the
high incidence of conscientious objection among doctors and
hospital personnel."
Legitimizing and Promoting
Prostitution
The U.N. recommendations concerning prostitution dramatically
illustrate one of that organization's social policy goals: the
decoupling of the reproductive act and marriage. A review of CEDAW
committee recommendations makes clear that the U.N. implementing
committees want to elevate the status of prostitution to that of a
profession and afford it the full protection of labor law and the
social benefits accorded other professions. The initial steps the
committees recommend to nations that prohibit prostitution are
benign, but the recommendations progress to full legitimization in
nations that already legally allow it. From the reports, the
process involves these steps:
-
Eliminate the economic
vulnerability of poor women who prostitute themselves for
income;
-
Combat the feminization of
poverty;
-
Rehabilitate prostitutes;
-
End international trafficking in
prostitution;
-
Enforce some laws concerning
prostitution;
-
Punish pimps and procurers;
-
Decriminalize prostitution;
-
Legalize prostitution;
-
Regulate prostitution; and
- Grant the full protection of labor
and social law to prostitution as a profession.
Consider the progression in the actual
report excerpts that follow. The U.N. committee advises the Czech
Republic to "take effective action to combat feminization of
poverty and to improve the economic situation of women in order to
prevent trafficking and prostitution." The U.N. committee urges
Bulgaria
to
cooperate at the regional and international levels with regard to
the problem of trafficking in women and their exploitation through
prostitution. [The U.N.] suggests that in order to tackle the
problem of trafficking in women, it is essential to address women's
economic vulnerability, which is the root cause of the problem.
The
last sentence reveals that for the U.N. committee, the "problem" is
solely a woman's economic condition, not also the sexual
exploitation of women. But in France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Belgium,
and other highly developed economies, prostitution prospers;
neither poverty nor "economic vulnerability" is the root cause.
Furthermore, in developed Western countries, the feminization of
poverty is largely due to the breakdown of marriage, as social
science research has shown.
The
U.N. committee is pushing Mexico to legalize prostitution; it
"strongly recommends that new legislation should not discriminate
against prostitutes but should punish pimps and procurers." To tiny
Liechtenstein, the U.N. recommends that "a review be made of the
law relating to prostitution to ensure that prostitutes are not
penalized." The U.N. policy goal
becomes clear in the report to Greece, where prostitution has been
decriminalized and "instead is dealt with in a regulatory
manner"--though the U.N. "is concerned that inadequate structures
exist to ensure compliance with the regulatory framework." To
Germany, the U.N.'s advice is to raise the standing of the
legalized profession even higher because, "although they are
legally obliged to pay taxes, prostitutes still do not enjoy the
protection of labor and social law."
This
progression, from urging countries that prohibit prostitution to
move quickly to foster a national debate on legalizing the
activity
to chastising Germany for not elevating it to the status of a
legally protected profession, is even more startling when one
remembers that for the U.N. committees, the celebration of Mother's
Day is disturbing, and policies and laws that protect the role of
the mother at home are offensive.
Redefining Gender: Reconstructing
Social Norms
The U.N. is intent on removing the cultural and legal
structures that have shepherded reproduction and the nurturing of
children into the married family. The U.N. committees
recommend:
-
Combating traditional sex roles and
stereotypes;
-
Defining gender as merely a social
construct, not a biological distinction;
-
Rewriting textbooks and curricula
in all school grades to promote the new definition of gender;
-
Funding gender studies that will
foster these attitudes;
-
Retraining professions in gender
issues and gender equity; and
- Conducting public relations
campaigns on gender issues.
To
the layman, the issue of redefining gender sounds like a strange
battle in semantics, since the definition of gender is a biological
distinction--male and female. But in U.N. policy documents, gender
is seen as a "social construct," a delineation of the ways men and
women act differently and the structures society organizes around
these differences. In this way, "gender" includes alternative
lifestyles like homosexuality.
Redefining gender has two components:
eliminating social constraints and creating a new framework whereby
homosexuality and other non-traditional lifestyles are accepted as
normal.
According to the U.N. bureaucracy, all "constructs" should have
equal standing in society and law; all aspects of gender that
reinforce the biological differences between males and females,
including the traditional roles they hold, are to be
eliminated.
When
the U.N. committees speak of gender, they sometimes mean the
different treatment that men and women receive. Other times, they
mean the treatment of heterosexuals and homosexuals. Recent
international debates at the U.N. illustrate the determination of
developed nations to eradicate the distinctions between these
distinctions in social policy. For example, a number of wealthy
nations allied with radical feminist NGOs at the Beijing+5
conference in New York in June 2000 sought to have the term "sexual
orientation" included in the final conference document. Despite
the fact that enough delegates had voted to delete references to
"sexual orientation" and use the term "other status" instead,
members of this alliance declared that they would not abide by the
agreed-upon language, and instead would interpret references to
"other status" to include sexual orientation. Such definitional battles
are at the forefront of ongoing debates over cultural issues at the
U.N.
Changing Laws and Textbooks
Government efforts to reengineer social norms are not new. They
are endemic to totalitarian regimes, which try to remake
individuals and societies through thought control. Socialists, for
example, believe the quickest way to change social mores is to
change laws and public education. The U.N. committees
implementing the CRC and CEDAW agreements are no different.
Denmark, China, and Georgia received
recommendations similar to the following given to Ireland: "provide
sex disaggregated data on academic personnel in the universities
[and] information on the activities and programs on women's studies
centers...[showing] to what extent gender and women's studies
courses are integrated into the curricula of conventional
disciplines in tertiary education." The CEDAW committee also
asked Ireland to
ensure, through various means and
channels, that gender training is not only an integral part of law
school curricula but that it is also part of the continuing
education of legal professionals and the judiciary. It also
encourages the Government to ensure that an adequate number of
women are selected for appointment to specialized courts such as,
for example, family courts.
This
theme is repeated often. To Peru, the U.N. committee "recommends,
as a matter of priority, the inclusion in gender equality programs
of a component to promote the gradual elimination of harmful
stereotypes, and a general awareness-raising campaign to eradicate
them."
Such
reeducation, redefining, and retraining is all part of the effort
to change sexual and social norms to promote unrestricted sexual
behaviors. To achieve that goal, however, governments must provide
universal legal support for sex outside marriage; ensure the
trivialization of marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, and family in
law; and begin to erect structures for the continuous transfer of
revenue to pay for the massive effects from the breakdown of the
family.
Animus Toward Religious Freedom
Western moral norms are founded generally on the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Both have powerful norms for personal
behavior. The U.N., because it seeks the acceptance of behaviors
that have long been prohibited by these major religions, realizes
that its policies eventually will provoke a direct clash with these
religions. To quote Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N.'s Special
Rapporteur on Violence Against Women:
The
right to self-determination [of nations] is pitted against the
CEDAW articles that oblige the state to correct any inconsistency
between international human rights laws and the religious and
customary laws operating within its territory.... While
international human rights law moves forward to meet the demands of
the international women's movement, the reality in many societies
is that women's rights [as interpreted by the feminist movement]
are under challenge from alternative cultural expressions.... The
movement is not only generating new interpretations of existing
human rights doctrine...but it is also generating new rights. The
most controversial is the issue of sexual rights.... One can only
hope that the common values of human dignity and freedom will
triumph over parochial forces attempting to confine women to the
home.
The
moral issue of abortion highlights this clash of cultures. The U.N.
committee believes, for example, that religiously affiliated
hospitals that refuse to offer abortions discriminate against
women.
Hospitals and doctors that adhere to their religious beliefs and
uphold a tradition that goes back to ancient Greece and Hippocrates
are targeted for violating human rights by the Office of the U.N.
Commissioner on Human Rights. One illustration of this is the U.N.
report to Italy, which noted "particular concern with regard
to the limited availability of abortion services for women in
southern Italy, as a result of the high incidence of conscientious
objection among doctors and hospital personnel." In such a strongly
Catholic part of Italy, it would be paradoxical if the opposite
were the case.
In
the United States and many other countries, a clear distinction is
drawn between the roles of church and state in ensuring religious
freedom. Not so at the United Nations. The U.N. committees attack
the national religious culture of Ireland by suggesting that
expressions of the popular will, even in democracies, are
invalid precisely because the people have deeply held beliefs with
religious roots. The people of Ireland have voted down two
referenda that sought to legalize abortion. The CEDAW committee
objects to this expression of the public will. Its report asserts
that
although Ireland is a secular State, the
influence of the Church is strongly felt not only in attitudes and
stereotypes, but also in official State policy. In particular,
women's right to health, including reproductive health [i.e.,
abortion], is compromised by this influence....
And
to highly secular Norway, which protects religious minorities in
law, the U.N. writes:
The
Committee is especially concerned with provisions in the Norwegian
legislation to exempt certain religious communities from compliance
with the equal rights law. Since women often face greater
discrimination in family and personal affairs in certain
communities and in religion, they asked the Government to amend the
Norwegian Equal Status Act to eliminate exceptions based on
religion.
The
U.N.'s hostility to religious freedom is also clear in its advice
to Indonesia, which is vastly different in culture from Ireland:
"Cultural and religious values cannot be allowed to undermine the
universality of women's rights," and "[i]n all countries
the most significant factors inhibiting women's ability to
participate in public life have been the cultural framework of
values and religious beliefs."
To
Croatia, the U.N. states, "there is evidence that church-related
organizations adversely influence the government's policies
concerning women and thereby impede full implementation of the
[CEDAW] Convention." And the U.N. committee
tells China, after it had sought to uphold the tradition of
religious freedom in Hong Kong following the takeover, that it is
most concerned with the fact that China "entered seven reservations
and declarations in respect of the provisions of the Convention as
applied to Hong Kong. Of particular concern is the reservation
exempting `the affairs of religious denominations or orders' from
the scope of the Convention."
Clearly, this hostility to any
manifestation of religious belief in public policy will bring the
U.N. into direct confrontation with peoples that hold traditional
beliefs.
The
U.N. committee even recommends that the government of Libya
reinterpret the country's religious laws and scripture in
order to pave the way for other Islamic governments to do the
same.
WHAT WASHINGTON MUST DO
The
United States and other signatories of the U.N. Charter recognize
that each nation has a right to determine its own domestic
policies. The United States jealously protects its own sovereignty
and on principle should respect the sovereignty of other nations
when those policies do not conflict with important U.S. interests.
Clearly, while the United States is working to strengthen the
family domestically through legislation like welfare reform and
buttressing parents' rights, these same efforts among nations that
have signed and ratified the U.N.'s Convention to Eliminate All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women and its Convention on the
Rights of the Child are under attack.
Though it has not ratified either of these
treaties, the United States under President Bill Clinton supported
the efforts of the U.N. implementing bodies to force nations that
afford legal and institutional support for the two-parent married
family, for the role of mothers and fathers in raising their
children, and for the importance of traditional social norms to
change those laws and policies. As the leader of the free world and
a strong proponent of individual and religious freedoms, the United
States under President George W. Bush must take the lead in efforts
to expose the fallacies inherent in this radical new agenda at the
United Nations. To this end, the Administration and Congress
should:
-
Make clear to the United Nations that
the United States will not ratify the Convention on the Rights
of the Child or sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women because of the U.N.'s controversial
interpretations of and efforts to implement them.
-
Make clear to the United Nations that
the United States is firmly in favor of the right of parents to
make decisions regarding the health, education, and religious
upbringing of their children. Congress could emphasize this point
by introducing legislation to protect the family, much as the
Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act (S. 984/H.R. 1946)
introduced in the 104th Congress affirmed parents' fundamental
right to direct the upbringing of their children. Such legislation
also could offer other nations a model for strengthening their own
laws to protect the family.
- Urge U.N. member states to refuse, as
Australia has done, to cooperate with U.N. reporting systems
when U.N. committees work to undermine their sovereignty. The
United States should counter reprisals against countries that
follow this advice. Norway, Sweden, and Germany, for example,
threatened to withdraw their aid from Nicaragua last year unless it
removed its Minister of the Family, Max Padilla, from his post. At
the Cairo+5 and Beijing+5 preparatory conferences, Padilla had
blocked resolutions by a voting bloc known as JUSCANZ to
redefine gender, to require all obstetricians and gynecologists to
learn to do abortions regardless of their beliefs, and to remove
"conscience clause" protections. For Nicaragua, with its faltering
economy, losing that source of
revenue was a significant threat to which it would have difficulty
adjusting in the short term, so the president removed Padilla from
his post.
To take the teeth out of such threats, the
United States should make known that it will assist countries that
are threatened for rejecting U.N. proposals. Too many small
countries have little recourse and are too dependent on development
assistance to fight assaults on sovereignty by the U.N.
bureaucracy. The United States must protect the interests of these
countries as well. For example, it should assist representatives
from NGOs that support the family and marriage and countries that
oppose the committee's attacks on these valuable institutions to
enable them to attend U.N. conferences and have their voices heard,
alongside those of left-leaning NGOs that promote anti-marriage and
family policies.
-
Hold hearings on the efforts of
agents of the U.N. to force nations to implement policies that
undermine the family, religious freedom, and national sovereignty,
to give particular attention to the way the United States has voted
and will vote at U.N. conferences on these social issues.
-
Require the Department of State to
submit an annual performance report on the activities of all
U.N. agencies and committees. U.S. contributions to the U.N.
agencies should be weighed against performance, consistent with national
interests, and meet an acceptable level of professional competence.
Congress should set benchmarks for performance with regard to
strengthening the family and traditional religious institutions.
Funding for U.N. agencies and organizations that work deliberately
to undermine the right of sovereign nations to determine their own
domestic policies should be restricted. U.N. agencies should be
subjected to the same oversight Congress gives domestic programs.
Congress demands performance outcome reporting from U.S. government
agencies under the Government Performance and Results Act; it
should expect no less an accounting from international bodies that
spend U.S. tax dollars. It should use these reports each year to
determine whether the U.N. programs, agencies, and affiliated
organizations deserve continued funding.
-
Require the Assistant Secretary of
State for International Organizations, in coordination with the
State Department's Legal Adviser, in the State Department's annual
President's Report to Congress on U.S. Participation in the
U.N., to report on the performance and activities of the U.N.
CEDAW and CRC committees and to develop new instructions for the
involvement of the United States in any conventions and meetings
dealing with issues of the family, marriage, sexual activity, and
abortion.
-
Attach a rider to funding for the
U.N. and the World Bank specifying that any distribution of U.S.
funds or contracts awarded to NGOs be made publicly available in a
manner similar to that practiced by the U.S. government in its
competitive bidding process. Funds should not be appropriated for
activities that violate traditional family and religious norms or
that undermine a nation's sovereignty.
-
Request that the U.S. General
Accounting Office assess the flow of funds from the United
States to NGOs acting under the auspices of the U.N. in the past
eight years to determine whether there has been any indirect
support of their countercultural activities.
- Start forming a new alliance at the
U.N. with countries that work to protect and strengthen the family,
religious freedom, and national sovereignty.
CONCLUSION
The
United Nations has become the tool of a powerful feminist-socialist
alliance that has worked deliberately to promote a radical
restructuring of society. This alliance is attempting to sway
nations to accept an agenda that, from the U.N.'s foundation, has
been outside its jurisdiction. The alliance is advancing its agenda
primarily by promoting the reinterpretation of the CRC and CEDAW
treaties at the five- and ten-year follow-up conferences and
encouraging nations to change their domestic policies.
The
United States should object to this interference and work to
reverse this trend, for the good of families, women, and children
around the world. Congress and the President should devote the time
and resources necessary to assess the danger these U.N. policies
pose to the sovereignty and stability of nations and to build an
alliance of family-friendly nations that will work together to
ensure that the rights of parents and religious
freedom are protected in U.N. policies.
Patrick F.
Fagan is William H. G. FitzGerald Fellow in Family and
Cultural Issues at The Heritage Foundation.
Endnotes