On Sunday, July 2, the New York Times broke the story of a vast, left-wing conspiracy to impose abortion rights on the entire world. The item ran on page A1, above the fold, long the most influential location in all of journalism. Surprised you missed it?

The New York Times did not quite see the news as a conspiracy, and therefore did not report it as a conspiracy. So there it was — hiding in plain sight — the pro-abortion Buffett billions joining the pro-abortion Gates billions, in order to dominate the international development agenda. According to the Times, Buffett's foundation will now “be able to greatly increase spending on birth control and on making abortions available, a cause supported by both Warren Buffett and his late wife, Susan Thompson Buffett. He has spoken relatively little about the issue in public, and neither did she.”

Buffett has not felt it necessary to explain his embrace of abortion rights, nor, with his donation to the Gates Foundation, of assembling history's greatest international charitable foundation to pursue such rights, and the New York Times certainly did not think it was necessary to question him. Is abortion the agenda that needs no justification?

The Christian Science Monitor, in one of its columns, attempted to fill in the gaps, speculating that, “Warren Buffett, one of the world's wealthiest men, undoubtedly recognized population-related problems in announcing last week plans to donate $37.4 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stock to several foundations. These include some he's created that emphasize family planning, abortion rights…”

So are we to believe that discredited Malthusian, population-bomb beliefs are driving Buffett? But where are the investigations of such motivations? Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor seems to agree with Buffett, citing a litany of chicken-little scenarios. Population growth, we are told, is resulting in “environmental changes, resource restraints, and a decline in the quality of life. World oil output is predicted to peak within 15 years. Fresh water in some areas is already in short supply. Farmland is being chewed up by swelling suburbia. Global warming, with its rising sea levels, will force hundreds of millions of people out of coastal regions in the next century or so.”

It is left to us, therefore, to rise above the culturally-approved hysterics and ask the questions ourselves, such as: Will the Gates Foundation, now the most powerful private foundation in the world, demand that nations liberalize abortion laws in order to qualify for other development funds? Indeed, with this amount of money, Gates could figuratively (perhaps even literally) buy and sell many small countries. Will the Gates foundation support the myriad non-governmental organizations, such as Planned Parenthood and Catholics for a Free Choice (Buffett has financed both) that have learned that legal manipulation — at both the national and international levels — may be the fastest way to overcome pesky things like constitutions and democratic decision-making? Finally, will the Gates foundation submit to any public oversight, now that two men, with all of their eccentricities and personal habits and inclinations, will possess as much influence as entire continents? How can we know that their personal predispositions will correspond to authentic development priorities?

Buffett and Gates now join Ted Turner and George Soros, with their own international foundations, as billionaires who believe they know better than the rest of the world, and will use their resources to impose their vision upon recalcitrant nations, especially the Catholic nations of Latin America and the Philippines. Of course, how many foundations does the Pope have to stop them?

And don't expect scrutiny of Gates and Buffett from the likes of the New York Times. Scrutiny is reserved for people like Thomas Monaghan, the entrepreneur who made a fortune selling pizza, and who sought to establish a single village in Florida where contraceptives and abortifacients would not be available (rather than to transform the entire world in his image). For the New York Times crowd, however, such an endeavor signaled the beginning of a new dark ages, not something to be celebrated on page A1, above the fold.

Douglas Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). His e-mail address is dsylva@thefactis.org.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

At the conclusion of the United Nation's annual Commission on the Status of Women last week, one women's advocate sniffed: “To ask governments and international financial institutions to ensure equal participation is a step in the right direction, but the problem is that they are not obligated to do so.”

Almost all of the international women's rights groups pursue this quest for new, expansive international law — international law with enforcement mechanisms, international law, that is, with sharp teeth. The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a US-based legal group that advocates for universal abortion on demand, has established in its own strategy papers that its “overarching goal is to ensure that governments worldwide guarantee reproductive rights out of an understanding that they are bound to do so.”

Why is this important? The just-concluded debate on the new Human Rights Council focused on the obvious issue: how to overcome the UN's official neutrality concerning the merits of its member states, and, therefore, how to overcome the embarrassment that nations such as Sudan and Libya must be granted the same formal respect — and the same access to shaping the UN's human rights agenda, its official pronouncements, and its condemnation of abuses — as nations such as Holland and New Zealand.

But while this discussion — whether any UN human rights body can avoid descending into farce — may be understandable, it is important to move beyond the topic of those actors who would seek to use human rights mechanisms to hide their own human rights violations, and discuss those actors, such as CRR, who, instead, would like to expand international human rights law and use it to transform the world.

As strange as it might sound, CRR, and other groups largely unknown beyond the confines of the United Nations, may be better placed to affect international human rights development than nation states; in fact, their activities pose a real challenge to the notion of sovereignty upon which statehood is based.

These groups rarely agitate for a new international treaty to ensconce their beliefs in explicit detail, for the simple reason that they know that sufficient international support does not exist for their agenda. Instead, they take the bedrock international treaties, treaties with almost universal support, and warp them to fit their purposes.

In this effort they are assisted by the committees set up by United Nations to monitor states' compliance with the international law treaties. These committees, working with the advocacy groups, sometimes staffed with members of these same groups, collude in order to stretch the official interpretations of the treaties beyond what their framers would have ever imagined possible.

Human Rights Watch — another non-governmental organization now devoted to the universal abortion license — is willing to admit that there is no “explicit treaty language on abortion.” But have no fear, “although the text of most international treaties is silent on the topic of abortion… authoritative interpretations of international law recognize that abortion is vitally important to women's exercise of their human rights. UN treaty bodies, which take a measured approach to interpreting international human rights law, have consistently and extensively opined on abortion access and restrictions. By our count, as of early 2005, at least 122 concluding observations on 93 countries spanning more than a decade by UN treaty bodies have substantively addressed how abortion relates to fundamental human rights. These bodies reason that firmly established human rights are jeopardized by restrictive or punitive abortion laws and practices.”

Thus, control the “authoritative” interpretative power, and it simply does not matter what the actual treaties, documents painstakingly crafted by member states over the course of years, actually say. At least 93 nations have been hectored into liberalizing their abortion laws, based on nothing that has been introduced by member states, debated by members states, agreed to by member states, or ratified by member states.

Another group, the International Women's Health Coalition, says much the same thing as Human Rights Watch: IWHC admits that no UN treaties “explicitly assert a woman's right to abortion, nor do they legally require safe abortion services.” But, “Despite these qualifications… the human rights instruments — if broadly interpreted and skillfully argued — can be very useful tools in efforts to expand access to safe abortion.”

In the echo chamber of radical non governmental organizations and UN compliance committees, what is said bounces back and forth, building in volume to a crescendo of mutual reinforcement. Thus, what starts as the outlandish musings of some radical law professor become the accepted interpretations of the major international human rights treaties.

And so the Center for Reproductive Rights can go before the United Nations Human Rights Committee just last week and assert — without fear of correction — that the United States has fallen out of compliance with the principle international treaty defending civil and political rights, because the Bush administration has failed “to protect women's reproductive rights,” even though the word “reproductive” itself never appears in the text in question (let alone the word abortion).

Such a strategy is best described as a game, one that shows disdain for the right of nations to know the extent of the obligations they accept upon themselves, as well as disdain for the citizens around the world who will never know how such change occurs, or how or to whom they could ever hope to voice dissent. As CRR itself concluded in a paper outlining this strategy, “there is a stealth quality to the work.”

Douglas Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). His email address is dsylva@thefactis.org.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

Can a single blind man bring down the most coercive population control program in world history? Last October, I reported in this space on Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese human rights activist who dared to wonder — in public — if women were still being forced into aborting their children in order to comply with the state's population laws. And, once he had lifted the veil of fear and secrecy, even an inch, hundreds of people came forward to tell of the human rights violations that had been committed against them. Time magazine recounted the tale of a woman named Li Juan:

The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. “At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot,” says the 23-year-old. “Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore.” Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang (Bright). The baby was dead. To be absolutely sure, says Li, the officials — from the Linyi region, where she lives, in China's eastern Shandong province — dunked the infant's body for several minutes in a bucket of water beside the bed.

And lo and behold China had a full-blown public relations problem on its hands.

But China knows how to handle such things. Since the inception of the one-child policy, the rest of the world seems to rouse itself to consciousness of these crimes every few years, only to eventually lose interest. All that China must do is remain patient.

China knows that the United Nations will buy its time, by trumpeting the progress, liberalization, reform in China that is always about to free Chinese women and their families. It has been this way since 1979, when the Chinese State Family Planning Commission and the United Nations Population Fund devised the one-child policy together. And so, it should have come as no surprise that, two months after Chen rose to prominence, UNFPA issued a report entitled “Easing Family Planning Rules Leads to Fewer Abortions and More Baby Girls, Chinese Province Finds.” Note the very first word — easing — not ending. We are told that the human rights violations are being “reduced” and “phased out,” as if the UN does not understand the offensiveness of telling the world to accept the perpetrators' schedule for reform, not the victims.

Chen is never mentioned; the allegations of all of those people who came to him never refuted. But UNFPA had the temerity to say that, “Chinese law prohibits the use of force to impose birth limits,” as if there is the rule of law in China when it comes to population control.

But technology may make it harder for China and UNFPA to win this time — to reduce Chen to anonymity. After Chen's story reached the West, he was put under house arrest for providing “intelligence” to foreigners. His phones were jammed. But when a power failure crippled his captors' equipment, he was able to call Reuters on a mobile phone and tell the news agency of his plight. The Reuters reporter barely knew how to describe the situation, alternating between calling his captors “thugs” or “club-wielding goons.”

“China is lawless,” Chen said. “They're worried I will expose more of their crimes.”

Douglas Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). His e-mail address is dsylva@thefactis.org.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

But the riots do allow us to evaluate the present and future challenges facing Europe. First, and most importantly, although demographics are not destiny, the population trends facing the continent mean that the problem — integrating large numbers of Muslim immigrants — will not solve itself.

Just about every nation in Europe has now had below replacement-rate fertility for a length of time unprecedented in human history; it has been over three decades, for instance, since Germany experienced a year in which more native Germans were born than died. Real population decline is now occurring, and will only accelerate: The UN predicts that most European nations will lose between 10 to 30% of their population over the next 50 years. Just to maintain its current population, Italy would need over 16 million immigrants over that period.

But the real problem is even more dire than that, for European populations are also aging rapidly, meaning that the all-important ratio of workers to dependents continues to fall. Social welfare systems designed to be supported by the productive capacity of eight workers for every one dependent now have a ratio of four to one, and will eventually have a ratio of only two to one.

Three years ago, UN demographers investigated whether replacement migration could offset this dual challenge of fertility decline and aging, and discovered that the numbers that would be needed to do so are so high as to be impossible: 94 million immigrants would be required for France, alone, and 1.4 billion for all of Europe. If European nations did follow this path in order to maintain their current social welfare systems, by 2050 anywhere from 59 to 99 percent of each country's population would be foreign-born.

So the choice now taken by European governments — allowing enough immigrants to prop up their economies in the short time, even at the cost of some social unrest, will not be sufficient in the long term.

Second, Europe has found no optimal way to integrate its immigrants. From the Dutch policy of full multiculturalism to the French policy of blind equality, all have resulted in outbreaks of violence and mutual distrust. As the proportion of immigrants steadily rises, European government policies will swing on a pendulum from liberal pandering, through law-and-order crackdowns, through a neglect bred of confusion. European populations will flirt more frequently with far-right, anti-immigrant political parties, and European foreign policy, especially toward the Middle East, will be made in order to avoid inciting domestic Muslim populations.

Third, the grand experiment that is the European Union, an experiment that depends upon a new European citizenry devoid of strong parochial attachments, will be hampered both by native Europeans regaining appreciation of their national cultural identities in the face of the perceived immigrant threat, as well as by the immigrants, themselves, whose values differ strongly from the secular humanist philosophical foundation of the EU.

Fourth, the US and the EU will continue to drift apart. According to the UN migration study, “The European Union and the United States — the world's two largest economic blocks, often in competition with each other — are projected to follow starkly contrasting demographic paths in the coming decades.” The US will grow as the EU declines, both through more healthy native fertility as well as through immigration that poses much less of a challenge to this society of immigrants.

In 2050, there will be more US workers than EU workers, suggesting that the US will continue to prosper during the next few decades, while the EU struggles to maintain the social systems — free health care, generous welfare and pension benefits — that Europeans deem to be morally superior to the US model, and through which many Europeans like to define themselves. It is possible, therefore, that the cross-Atlantic relationship could be increasingly marred by the old fashioned sentiments of pride and envy.

Fifth, it is not clear that Europeans understand the depth of the malaise that must be at the heart of their fertility decline. A civilization cannot continue without babies, but a number of EU countries are expanding their already liberal abortion laws to ensure that any EU woman can obtain a free, state-sponsored abortion in their countries. Pressure is mounting on Ireland, Poland, Malta and Portugal, the last holdouts before a European-wide abortion license, even though their own fertility rates are already perilously low.

Only if this malaise, be it spiritual or philosophical, is addressed, and large numbers of Europeans once again welcome new life into the world, will the continent's future be brighter than all of those smoldering hulks of cars in the Paris suburbs. The UN demographers are not hopeful, concluding that, “the recent experience of low-fertility countries suggests that there is no reason to assume that their fertility will return anytime soon to the above-replacement level.” But, again, demographics is not destiny.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

And so, as you walk your perfect little princesses or pirates around the neighborhood tonight, understand that you are celebrating not only Halloween, but the start of the annual American war over the evolution of our national holidays, a season that begins on October 31 and does not truly end until Presidents' Day in late February.

Conservatives have long suspected that something great is at stake in all of the seemingly insignificant skirmishes along the way, like “Season's Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” replacing “Merry Christmas” as the generic late-December salutation, perhaps knowing, instinctively, that there is a civic corollary to the religious axiom, lex orandi, lex credendi.

Take, for instance, the sacrifice of Lincoln and Washington's Birthdays (and their combination into Presidents' Day), in order to make room for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Whatever the merits of MLK Day, a civic lesson of sorts is taught by the demotion of the presidents, and by the loss of their names. (This year, notice how many people misplace the apostrophe. Would they dare to be as sloppy with Martin Luther King Day?)

So what is to explain Halloween's explosive growth? A community must have communal values, as well as communal celebrations that reinforce those values, or it is not a community. Although the United States has no established religion, Christmas has always served as the country's most important holiday, a holiday that reinforced the bedrock morality of American civilization. But in an aggressively secularist age, this cannot stand, and an alternative must be sought.

In this regard, Halloween is a potent rival, and it has a number of immediately obvious advantages: it is tied to neither familial nor religious ritual, so neither hearth nor church can make any claims upon it.

Digging deeper, Halloween is the perfect post-modern celebration. Halloween is about disguise, shifting meaning, self-invention or reinvention. No wonder Halloween is the favorite holiday of the homosexual community, in many regards the vanguard of modern American culture. New York City's Village Halloween parade, notorious for its lewd and homoerotic content, is the holiday's major event, and people all over the world now watch it on television like Catholics the world over watch midnight Mass at Saint Peter's.

According to the parade's website, the official theme for last year's parade was “Sweet. Not just candy, though it is ubiquitous on Halloween, but Sweet in the Philosophical sense — Bliss! Joy! Easefulness of body, mind and spirit. It's when you are dancing in your costume right there in the present moment, loving it… feeling the feeling, laughing, playing the crowd, opening your mind and heart to the sweetness of life.”

All this talk of “sweet” brings to mind the current animating philosophy of the Supreme Court, what Justice Scalia has derided as the “sweet-mystery-of-life passage.” It is this principle — “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life” — that has been used to justify abortion on demand (if you can define the mystery of human life, you can define who doesn't qualify as human life). It will be used, sometime soon, in a judicial decision in favor of homosexual marriage. And it is this principle, at core, that tastes so sweet on Halloween: self-creation above all else, self-creation beyond consequences (“right there in the present moment”).

This is a “universe” with the individual as its sun, an individual who is free to shine light on others or cast them into oblivion at his whim. Compare this to the universe that the Star of Bethlehem illuminated, and it will be clear why these two holidays are in conflict. On Christmas, we celebrate, in part, a man and a woman who most definitely did not define their own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life. On the contrary, they were asked to accept the greatest mystery of human history, at the cost of all of the dreams they may have had about how their own lives would play out. (Have you ever imagined what St. Joseph must have been thinking?) And they did so. This is the battle between the holiday of self-sacrifice (both human and divine) in the name of the greater good versus the holiday of self-creation in the name of individual fulfillment. We see the one slipping and the other ascending. We see the one under siege and the other fully animating the most powerful branch of our government, so that law now promulgates and reinforces its animating principle.

That is why even fully-secularized Christmas messages are now being expunged, not because they have explicit Christian content — they don't — but because they contradict the increasingly triumphant ethos of unlimited autonomy at the core of Halloween. Even Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, long derided as an illustration of the commercial corruption of Christmas (he was, after all, an invention of the Montgomery Ward department store), is a casualty in this war, and his memorable little anthem has been deemed inappropriate at some public schools.

For even Rudolph, lowly Rudolph, eventually triumphs only through taking on an onerous task for the good of others, not through prancing down the street, shining his nose to draw attention to himself. And we would never want our children to learn that lesson.

(This article courtesy of The Fact Is.org.)

Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, describes the steep demographic decline now taking place in both the developed and developing worlds, and asks the question, “So where will the children of the future come from? The answer may be from people who are at odds with the modern environment” of urbanization and economic and materialistic advancement, notably those people with strong religious convictions who “reject the game altogether.”

“Does this mean that the future belongs to those who believe they are (or who are in fact) commanded by a higher power to procreate?” wonders Longman. “Based on current trends, the answer appears to be yes.”

Longman claims that “there is a strong correlation between religious conviction and high fertility. In the United States, for example, fully 47 percent of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church.”

Longman even asserts that people with strong religious convictions are now beginning to enjoy a profound “evolutionary advantage” over nonreligious people, since the “clean living” of the religious boosts fertility and overall health. He writes that, “Current demographic trends work against modernity in another way as well. Not only is the spread of urbanization and industrialization itself a major cause of falling fertility, it is also a major cause of so-called diseases of affluence, such as overeating, lack of exercise, and substance abuse, which leave a higher and higher percentage of the population stricken by chronic medical conditions. Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons or Muslims.”

Longman sees little reason for hope that a worldwide demographic catastrophe can be avoided. “Once,” he writes, “demographers believed that some law of human nature would prevent fertility rates from remaining below replacement level within any healthy population for more than brief periods…. Today, however, it has become clear that no law of nature ensures that human beings, living in free, developed societies, will create enough children to reproduce themselves. Japanese fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the mid-1950s, and the last time Europeans produced enough children to reproduce themselves was the mid-1970s.

Nor can immigration resolve fertility decline. According to Longman, “if the United States hopes to maintain the current ratio of workers to retirees over time, it will have to absorb an average of 10.8 million immigrants annually through 2050.”

(This update courtesy of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.)

In its latest publication, the pro-abortion group “Catholics” for a Free Choice (CFFC) uses the HIV/AIDS epidemic in an attempt to undermine Catholic moral teaching on sexuality. In the pamphlet, “Sex in the HIV/AIDS Era, a Guide for Catholics,” CFFC writes that, “Economic, social and cultural conditions have expanded and challenged the church’s view that only in a lifelong, monogamous heterosexual marriage is sexual expression morally permitted.”

According to CFFC, the movement away from marriage represents progress. The pamphlet makes the case that “as the world has changed people have also changed and attitudes and practices around sex have become more mature, responsible and compassionate.” Part of this compassion involves recognizing that “not all sex outside of marriage is sinful. The ethical norms by which we judge the goodness of sex must expand beyond the mere technical fact of marriage.” What is more, “same-sex commitments are rightly more accepted and the human and sexual rights of all people should be upheld regardless of sexual orientation.” CFFC describes “sexual expression” within homosexual relationships as “healthy and holy.”

In contrast, while CFFC approves of homosexual sex, they condemn the traditional Christian conception of sexuality within marriage saying it “does not promote responsible and mature sexuality…” Instead, mature sexuality occurs when there is a need for condoms and condoms are used. As CFFC asserts, “Using a condom should be a sign of trust and associated with responsible and mature sex.”

The pamphlet is this year’s installment in CFFC multi-year effort to undermine Church teaching on condoms and sexuality, entitled “Condoms4Life.” CFFC claims “Condoms4Life is an unprecedented worldwide public education effort to raise public awareness about the devastating effect of the bishop’s ban on condoms.”

Much of this effort depends upon spreading misinformation about Church teaching. According to the pamphlet, “In reality, there is no one Catholic position on using condoms to prevent the transmission of AIDS….As Catholics we are free to choose which of these interpretations is most moral in our circumstances and to do what our consciences tell us is correct.” Of course, this is incorrect.

CFFC also downplays the significance of condom failure rates. CFFC cites a UNAIDS report “that condoms have an estimated 90 percent rate of protection. The ten percent failure rate does not mean that 1 in 10 condoms is defective; human error – such as condoms slipping off, breaking, or not being used early enough or at all – also contributes to the failure rate.”

Finally, CFFC attacks Uganda’s successful HIV prevention strategy, which, according to USAID, relied on abstinence and fidelity, not condoms. CFFC objects to this “hierarchical approach to prevention,” since “it reinforces negative attitudes towards sex and sexuality since abstinence is placed above having sex.”

Douglas Sylva is the vice president of Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocacy on behalf of the rights and responsibilities of men, women and children, especially within the framework of the family as the fundamental unit of society.