(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
Describing these events to a supportive audience at the Heritage Foundation recently, Padilla, married 16 years and father of five, said the family is the nucleus of society, and “destroying the family” — as he believes the anti-family policies he opposed would do — means destroying society itself.
What happened to Padilla was not an isolated incident, according to Heritage marriage and family specialist Patrick Fagan. In the Clinton years, Fagan said, it was all too typical of what might befall people who stood up to population controllers, feminists and advocates of radical cultural change whom the American government supported at the UN and in other international settings.
This is a painfully familiar story. Who, for instance, can forget the titanic and relatively successful struggle waged by Pope John Paul II against pro-abortion, anti-family policies advocated by the U.S. and the European Union at the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994?
Even so, hostility to the UN is so much a cliche of conservative discourse that one naturally hesitates to add to it. Padilla and Fagan made the point that the UN is an established fixture on the world scene that does much good. But lately the international organization often has worked against the interests of the traditional family, contrary to principles of the UN human rights charter adopted in the aftermath of World War II. Egging it on in this ideological warfare have been the United States and the Europeans along with feminists, population controllers and interest groups backing radical social change.
In a new, documented study, Fagan charges that UN social policy bureaucrats aligned with “radical special interest groups” have pressured countries to “alter the very structure of their societies to decrease the emphasis on marriage, the nuclear family, parental authority, and religious beliefs.” Some examples:
• Urging governments to put legal mechanisms in place so that children can take their parents to court if they disagree over the content of sex education.
• Pushing Liechtenstein and Mexico to legalize prostitution, while offering encouragement to countries that have done so to put prostitution on a par with other occupations.
• Slapping Belarus’s wrist for observing Mother’s Day, inasmuch as the observance promotes a “sex-role stereotype.”
Fagan assigns special blame to UN bodies implementing international agreements on children’s rights and discrimination against women. He accuses the committees of going beyond these worthy goals and “attempting to force countries to implement a radical interpretation.”
Although neither the treaties nor the spin given them may have the force of law, they generate pressure on governments by impacting media and public opinion. Even more to the point, they have a bearing on who gets international financial assistance and who does not.
“If the UN committees have their way,” Fagan writes, “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.”
September brings an important new test — a General Assembly “summit” on children. The Bush administration is unlikely to pursue the policy of hostility to parents’ rights that the Clintonites supported. But it isn’t clear how hard it will fight to reverse abuses. Max Padilla will be watching with interest.
