We are committed to the worth of all humans regardless of sex, race, colour, or any other distinctions (Acts 10:34-35) and will respect them as persons made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27) and redeemed by Christ’s death and resurrection. The Old Testament law commands such respect (Deuteronomy 5:11-21). Jesus summarized this law as love for God and neighbour (Matthew 22:36-40). He ministered to all without distinction and His death on the cross was for all (John 3:16; Romans 5:8).

We are therefore pledged to active concern whenever human beings are demeaned, abused, depersonalized, or subjected to demonic forces in the world, whether by individuals or institutions (Galatians 3:28; Mark 2:27). We are committed to give meaning and significance to every person by God’s help.

Remembering our tendency to be prejudicial, as Christians we must grow in awareness of the worth, rights and needs of others.

Book of Discipline (Old)

330.1 Human Rights

1.1 We are committed to the worth of all persons regardless of sex, race, colour, or other distinctions (Acts 10:34-35) and will respect their inherent rights.

1.2 This commitment is based on the conviction that all persons are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). The Old Testament law commands such respect (Deuteronomy 5:11-21). Jesus summarized this law as love for God and neighbour (Matthew 22:36-40). He ministered to all without distinction and His death on the cross was for all (John 3:16; Romans 5:8).

1.3 We are therefore pledged to active concern whenever human beings are demeaned, abused, depersonalized, or subjected to demonic forces in the world, whether by individuals or institutions (Galatians 3:28; Mark 2:27). We are committed to give meaning and significance to every person by God’s help.

1.4 Remembering our tendency to be prejudicial, as Christians we must grow in awareness of the rights and needs of others.

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Human Rights: A Summary

Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms, 1982

Fundamental freedoms:

I. freedom of conscience and religion

II. freedom of though, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication

III. freedom of peaceful assembly

IV. freedom of association

Rights:

I. Democratic rights

II. Mobility rights

III. Legal rights (right to life, liberty and security of the person; security against unreasonable search or seizure; right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned; right to retain and instruct counsel; right to be tried within a reasonable time, presumed innocent until proven guilty)

IV. Equality rights (equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability)

The Canadian Human Rights Act

The Canadian Human Rights Act, which is based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, guarantees all Canadians an equal opportunity to work and live free of discrimination.

This legislation is binding on all federal departments and agencies, Crown corporations and businesses and industries under federal jurisdiction. The provinces and territories have also each enacted legislation prohibiting discrimination.

Discrimination is the act of treating someone in a different, negative or unfavourable way and/or establishing a distinction between certain persons or certain groups of persons, without justification, based on one of the eleven prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The prohibited grounds of discrimination are:

· race

· national or ethnic origin

· colour

· religion

· age

· sex (including pregnancy and childbirth)

· marital status

· family status

· conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted

· physical or mental disability

· sexual orientation

Summary of Human Rights

Besides basic human needs (food, shelter, clothing, health care), everyone should have the following 4 categories of human rights:

I. Political liberties ‑‑ freedom of association, assembly, and speech, freedom of the press and other mass media (such as radio and TV), freedom of conscience and religion

II. Economic liberties ‑‑ right to own property, freedom of contract, right to withhold labour

III. Legal liberties ‑‑ freedom from arbitrary arrest, right to free hearing, independent judiciary, access to counsel

IV. Egalitarian liberties ‑‑ right to employment, accommodation, education, without discrimination on the basis of race, colour, sex, creed, or economic circumstances

Human Equality

· ethical dilemma when human rights are in conflict with one another

· eg rights of the mother and the unborn child

· no powerful individuals may impose their will on the community

· no community may violate the rights of an individual or minority

James banished class distinctions from public worship: no favouritism between rich and poor (Jas 2:1-9)

Human Responsibility

Mt 22:39 Universal Declaration of Human Responsibility: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

The emphasis not on human rights but on responsibility.

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The U.S. Bill Of Rights (1791)

Amendments 1-10 of the Constitution

The Conventions of a number of the States having, at the time of adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added, and as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two-thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States; all or any of which articles, when ratified by three-fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the said Constitution, namely:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

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Canadian charter of rights and freedoms (1982)

Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:

Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms

1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Fundamental Freedoms

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

a) freedom of conscience and religion;

b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

d) freedom of association.

Democratic Rights

3. Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.

4. (1) No House of Commons and no legislative assembly shall continue for longer than five years from the date fixed for the return of the writs of a general election of its members.

(2) In time of real or apprehended war, invasion or insurrection, a House of Commons may be continued by Parliament and a legislative assembly may be continued by the legislature beyond five years if such continuation is not opposed by the votes of more than one-third of the members of the House of Commons or the legislative assembly, as the case may be.

5. There shall be a sitting of Parliament and of each legislature at least once every twelve months

Mobility Rights

6. (1) Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.

(2) Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right

a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and

b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.

(3) The rights specified in subsection (2) are subject to

a) any laws or practices of general application in force in a province other than those that discriminate among persons primarily on the basis of province of present or previous residence; and

b) any laws providing for reasonable residency requirements as a qualification for the receipt of publicly provided social services.

(4) Subsections (2) and (3) do not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration in a province of conditions of individuals in that province who are socially or economically disadvantaged if the rate of employment in that province is below the rate of employment in Canada.

Legal Rights

7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

9. Everyone has the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.

10. Everyone has the right on arrest or detention

a) to be informed promptly of the reasons therefor;

b) to retain and instruct counsel without delay and to be informed of that right; and

c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.

11. Any person charged with an offence has the right

a) to be informed without unreasonable delay of the specific offence;

b) to be tried within a reasonable time;

c) not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence;

d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal;

e) not to be denied reasonable bail without just cause;

f) except in the case of an offence under military law tried before a military tribunal, to the benefit of trial by jury where the maximum punishment for the offence is imprisonment for five years or a more severe punishment;

g) not to be found guilty on account of any act or omission unless, at the time of the act or omission, it constituted an offence under Canadian or international law or was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations;

h) if finally acquitted of the offence, not to be tried for it again and, if finally found guilty and punished for the offence, not to be tried or punished for it again; and

i) if found guilty of the offence and if the punishment for the offence has been varied between the time of commission and the time of sentencing, to the benefit of the lesser punishment.

12. Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

13. A witness who testifies in any proceedings has the right not to have any incriminating evidence so given used to incriminate that witness in any other proceedings, except in a prosecution for perjury or for the giving of contradictory evidence.

14. A party or witness in any proceedings who does not understand or speak the language in which the proceedings are conducted or who is deaf has the right to the assistance of an interpreter.

Equality Rights

15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

Official Languages of Canada

16. (1) English and French are the official languages of Canada and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and government of Canada.

(2) English and French are the official languages of New Brunswick and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the legislature and government of New Brunswick.

(3) Nothing in this Charter limits the authority of Parliament or a legislature to advance the equality of status or use of English and French.

16.1. (1) The English linguistic community and the French linguistic community in New Brunswick have equality of status and equal rights and privileges, including the right to distinct educational institutions and such distinct cultural institutions as are necessary for the preservation and promotion of those communities.

(2) The role of the legislature and government of New Brunswick to preserve and promote the status, rights and privileges referred to in subsection (1) is affirmed.

17. (1) Everyone has the right to use English or French in any debates and other proceedings of Parliament.

(2) Everyone has the right to use English or French in any debates and other proceedings of the legislature of New Brunswick.

18. (1) The statutes, records and journals of Parliament shall be printed and published in English and French and both language versions are equally authoritative.

(2) The statutes, records and journals of the legislature of New Brunswick shall be printed and published in English and French and both language versions are equally authoritative.

19. (1) Either English or French may be used by any person in, or in any pleading in or process issuing from, any court established by Parliament.

(2) Either English or French may be used by any person in, or in any pleading in or process issuing from, any court of New Brunswick.

20. (1) Any member of the public in Canada has the right to communicate with, and to receive available services from, any head or central office of an institution of the Parliament or government of Canada in English or French, and has the same right with respect to any other office of any such institution where

a) there is a significant demand for communications with and services from that office in such language; or

b) due to the nature of the office, it is reasonable that communications with and services from that office be available in both English and French.

(2) Any member of the public in New Brunswick has the right to communicate with, and to receive available services from, any office of an institution of the legislature or government of New Brunswick in English or French.

21. Nothing in sections 16 to 20 abrogates or derogates from any right, privilege or obligation with respect to the English and French languages, or either of them, that exists or is continued by virtue of any other provision of the Constitution of Canada.

22. Nothing in sections 16 to 20 abrogates or derogates from any legal or customary right or privilege acquired or enjoyed either before or after the coming into force of this Charter with respect to any language that is not English or French.

Minority Language Educational Rights

23. (1) Citizens of Canada

a) whose first language learned and still understood is that of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province in which they reside, or

b) who have received their primary school instruction in Canada in English or French and reside in a province where the language in which they received that instruction is the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of the province,

have the right to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in that language in that province.

(2) Citizens of Canada of whom any child has received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada, have the right to have all their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the same language.

(3) The right of citizens of Canada under subsections (1) and (2) to have their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the language of the English or French linguistic minority population of a province

a) applies wherever in the province the number of children of citizens who have such a right is sufficient to warrant the provision to them out of public funds of minority language instruction; and

b) includes, where the number of those children so warrants, the right to have them receive that instruction in minority language educational facilities provided out of public funds.

Enforcement

24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.

(2) Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

General

25. The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada including

a) any rights or freedoms that have been recognized by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763; and

b) any rights or freedoms that now exist by way of land claims agreements or may be so acquired.

26. The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed as denying the existence of any other rights or freedoms that exist in Canada.

27. This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

28. Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.

29. Nothing in this Charter abrogates or derogates from any rights or privileges guaranteed by or under the Constitution of Canada in respect of denominational, separate or dissentient schools.(93)

30. A reference in this Charter to a Province or to the legislative assembly or legislature of a province shall be deemed to include a reference to the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories, or to the appropriate legislative authority thereof, as the case may be.

31. Nothing in this Charter extends the legislative powers of any body or authority.

Application of Charter

32. (1)This Charter applies

a) to the Parliament and government of Canada in respect of all matters within the authority of Parliament including all matters relating to the Yukon Territory and Northwest Territories; and

b) to the legislature and government of each province in respect of all matters within the authority of the legislature of each province.

(2) Notwithstanding subsection (1), section 15 shall not have effect until three years after this section comes into force.

33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

(2) An Act or a provision of an Act in respect of which a declaration made under this section is in effect shall have such operation as it would have but for the provision of this Charter referred to in the declaration.

(3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

(4) Parliament or the legislature of a province may re-enact a declaration made under subsection (1).

(5) Subsection (3) applies in respect of a re-enactment made under subsection (4).

Citation

34. This Part may be cited as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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The English Bill of Rights (1689)

Introduction

This bill was a precursor to the American Bill of Rights, and set out strict limits on the Royal Family’s legal prerogatives such as a prohibition against arbitrary suspension of Parliament’s laws. More importantly, it limited the right to raise money through taxation to Parliament.

The English elite had just succeeded in ousting the Catholic King James, who had offended the protestant Church of England by aggressively promoting the Roman Catholic religion, in spite of laws that Parliament had passed. William of Orange and his wife Mary were crowned King and Queen of England (Mary was actually the daughter of the deposed King James II) in Westminster Abbey on April 11, 1689. As part of their oaths, the new King William III and Queen Mary were required to swear that they would obey the laws of Parliament. At this time, the Bill of Rights was read to both William and Mary. “We thankfully accept what you have offered us,” William replied, agreeing to be subject to law and to be guided in his actions by the decisions of Parliament.

The Bill was formally passed through Parliament after the coronation. On December 16, 1689, the King and Queen gave it Royal Assent which represented the end of the concept of divine right of kings. The Bill of Rights was designed to control the power of kings and queens and to make them subject to laws passed by Parliament. This concession by the royal family has been called the “bloodless revolution” or the “glorious revolution.” It was certainly an era for a more tolerant royal prerogative. William, for example, did not seek to oppress the supporters of the deposed and Catholic King James II, even as James tried as best he could to rally the Catholic forces within England, Scotland and Ireland against King William III.

The Bill of Rights was one of three very important laws made at this time. The other two were the 1689 Toleration Act (which promoted religious toleration) and the 1694 Triennial Act, which prevented the King from dissolving Parliament at his will and held that general elections had to be held every three years.

The 1689 Bill of Rights

An Act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject and settling the succession of the crown.

WHEREAS THE LORDS SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL, AND COMMONS, ASSEMBLED AT WESTMINSTER, LAWFULLY, FULLY, AND FREELY REPRESENTING ALL THE ESTATES OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS REALM, DID UPON THE THIRTEENTH DAY OF FEBRUARY, IN 1689, PRESENT UNTO THEIR MAJESTIES THEN CALLED AND KNOWN BY THE NAMES AND STYLE OF WILLIAM AND MARY, PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF ORANGE, BEING PRESENT IN THEIR PROPER PERSONS, A CERTAIN DECLARATION IN WRITING, MADE BY THE SAID LORDS AND COMMONS, IN THE WORDS FOLLOWING:

Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges, and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the protestant religion, and the laws and liberties of this kingdom.

* By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws, and the execution of laws, without consent of parliament.

* By committing and prosecuting divers worthy prelates, for humbly petitioning to be excused concurring to the said assumed power.

* By issuing and causing to be executed a commission under the great seal for erecting a court called, The court of commissioners for ecclesiastical causes.

* By levying money for and to the use of the crown, by pretence of prerogative, for other time, and in other manner, than the same was granted by parliament.

* By raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace, without consent of parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law.

* By causing several good subjects, being protestants, to be disarmed, at the same time when papists were both armed and employed, contrary to law.

* By violating the freedom of election of members to serve in parliament.

* By prosecutions in the court of King’s bench, for matters and causes cognizable only in parliament; and by divers other arbitrary and illegal courses.

* And whereas of late years, partial, corrupt, and unqualified persons have been returned and served on juries in trials and particularly divers jurors in trials for high treason, which were not freeholders.

* And excessive bail hath been required of persons committed in criminal cases, to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subject.

* And excessive fines have been imposed; and illegal and cruel punishments inflicted.

* And several grants and promises made of fines and forfeitures, before any conviction or judgment against the persons, upon whom the same were to be levied.

All of which are utterly and directly contrary to the known laws and statutes, and freedom of this realm.

And whereas the said late King James II having abdicated the government, and the throne being thereby vacant, his highness the Prince of Orange (whom it hath pleased Almighty God to make the glorious instrument of delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power) did (by the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal, and divers principal persons of the commons) cause letters to be written to the lords spiritual and temporal, being protestants; and other letters to the several counties, cities, universities, boroughs, and cinque-ports, for the choosing of such persons to represent them, as were of right to be sent to parliament, to meet and sit at Westminster upon the 22 January, 1689 in order to make such an establishment, as that their religion, laws, and liberties might not again be in danger of being subverted; upon which letters, elections have been accordingly made,

And thereupon the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, pursuant to their respective letters and elections, being now assembled in a full and free representative of this nation, taking into their most serious consideration the best means for attaining the ends aforesaid; do in the first place (as their ancestors in like cases have usually done) for the vindicating and asserting their ancient rights and liberties, declare:

* That the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal.

* That the pretended power of dispensing with laws, or the executions of laws, by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.

* That the commission for erecting the late court of commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature are illegal and pernicious.

* That levying money for or to the use of the crown, by pretence of prerogative, without grant of parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal.

* That it is the right of the subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

* That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of parliament, is against law.

* That the subjects which are protestants, may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.

* That election of members of parliament ought to be free.

* That the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament.

* That excessive bail ought not to be required,nor excessive fines imposed; nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

* That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials of high treason ought to be freeholders.

* That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction, are illegal and void.

* And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, parliaments ought to be held frequently.

And they do claim, demand, and insist upon all and singular the premisses, as their undoubted rights and liberties; and that no declarations, judgments, doings, or proceedings, to the prejudice of the people in any of the said premisses, ought in any wise to be drawn hereafter into consequence or example; to which demand of their rights they are particularly encouraged by the declaration of this highness the prince of Orange, as being the only means for obtaining a full redress and remedy therein.

Having therefore an entire confidence, That his said highness the Prince of Orange will perfect the deliverance so far advanced by him, and will still preserve them from the violation of their rights, which they have here asserted, and from all other attempts upon their religion, rights, and liberties, the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, assembled at Westminster, do resolve, That William and Mary prince and princess of Orange, be, and be declared, King and Queen of England, France and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, to hold the crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions to them the said prince and princess during their lives, and the life of the survivor of them; and that the sole and full exercise of the regal power be only in, and executed by the said prince of Orange, in the names of the said prince and princess, during their joint lives; and after their deceases, the said crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions to be to the heirs of the body of the said princess; and for default of such issue to the princess Anne of Denmark and the heirs of her body; and for default of such issue to the heirs of the said prince of Orange. And the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do pray the said prince and princess to accept the same accordingly.

And that the oaths hereafter mentioned be taken by all persons of whom the oaths of allegiance and supremacy might be required by law, instead of them; and that the said oaths of allegiance and supremacy may be abrogated.

“I, A.B. do sincerely promise and swear, That I will be faithful, and bear true allegiance, to their Majesties, King William and Queen Mary: So help me God.”

“I, A.B. do swear, That I from my heart abhor, detest, and abjure as impious and heretical, that damnable doctrine and position, That princes excommunicated or deprived by the pope, or any authority of the see of Rome, may be deposed or murdered by their subjects, or any other whatsoever. And I do declare, That no foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate hath, or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence, or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm, So help me God.”

Upon which their said Majesties did accept the crown and royal dignity of the kingdoms of England, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging, according to the resolution and desire of the said lords and commons contained in the said declaration.

And thereupon their Majesties were pleased, that the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, being the two houses of parliament, should continue to sit, and with their Majesties royal concurrence make effectual provision for the settlement of the religion, laws and liberties of this kingdom, so that the same for the future might not be in danger again of being subverted; to which the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, did agree and proceed to act accordingly.

Now in pursuance of the premisses, the said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, in parliament assembled, for the ratifying, confirming and establishing the said declaration, and the articles, clauses, matters, and things therein contained, by the force of a law made in due form by authority of parliament, do pray that it may be declared and enacted; that all and singular the rights and liberties asserted and claimed in the said declaration are the true, ancient, and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom, and so shall be esteemed, allowed, adjudged, deemed, and taken to be, and that all and every the particulars aforesaid shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed, as they are expressed in the said declaration; and all the officers and ministers whatsoever shall serve their Majesties and their successors according to the same in all times to come.

{WWLIA note: we have not reproduced two parts here. The first deals with the recognition that William III “did become, were, are, and of right ought to be, by the laws of this realm, our sovereign liege and lady, King and Queen of England; and the subsequent part of the 1689 Bill of Rights which dealt with the descent of the Crown to survivors of King William III and Mary.}

Whereas it hath been found by experience, that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this protestant kingdom, to be governed by a popish prince, or by any King or Queen marrying a papist.

The said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do further pray that it may be enacted, that all and every person and persons that is, are or shall be reconciled to, or shall hold communion with, the see or church of Rome, or shall profess the popish religion, or shall marry a papist, shall be excluded, and be for ever incapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the crown and government of this realm, and Ireland, and the dominions belonging thereunto, or any part of the same, or to have, use, or exercise any regal power, authority, or jurisdiction within the same. In all and every such case or cases the people of these realms shall be, and are hereby absolved of their allegiance. The said crown and government shall from time to time descend to, and be enjoyed by such person or persons, being protestants, as should have inherited and enjoyed the same, in case the said person or persons so reconciled, holding communion, or professing, or marrying as aforesaid, were naturally dead.

Every King and Queen of this realm, who at any time hereafter shall come to and succeed in the imperial crown of this kingdom, shall on the first day of the meeting of the first parliament, next after his or her coming to the crown, sitting his or her throne in the house of peers, in the presence of the lords and commons therein assembled, or at his or her coronation, before such person or persons who shall administer the coronation oath to him or her, at the time of his or her taking the said oath (which shall first happen) make, subscribe, and audibly repeat the declaration mentioned in the statute made in the thirtieth year of the reign of King Charles the Second, intituled, An act for the more effectual preserving the King’s person and government, by disabling papists from sitting in either house of parliament. But if it shall happen, that such King or Queen, upon his or her succession to the crown of this realm, shall be under the age of twelve years, then every such King or Queen shall make, subscribe, and audibly repeat the said declaration at his or her coronation, or the first day of the meeting of the first parliament as aforesaid, which shall happen after such King or Queen shall have attained the said age of twelve years.

All which their Majesties are contented and pleased shall be declared, enacted, and established by authority of this present parliament, and shall stand, remain, and be the law of this realm for ever; and the same are by their said Majesties, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, in parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, declared, enacted, and established accordingly.

It further declared and enacted by the authority aforesaid, that from and after this present session of parliament, no dispensation by “notwithstanding” of or to any statute, or any part thereof, shall be allowed, but that the same shall be held void and of no effect, except a dispensation be allowed of in such a statute, and except in such cases as shall be specially provided for by one or more bill or bills to be passed during this present session of parliament.

Provided that no charter, or grant, or pardon, granted before the three and twentieth day of October [1689] shall be any ways impeached or invalidated by this act, but that the same shall be and remain of the same force and effect in law, and no other than as if this act had never been made.

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Religion and the Future of Human Rights (Religion Online, 870819)

by Robert F. Drinan

Father Drinan is a former congressman from Massachusetts and former dean of Boston College Law School. When this article appeared he was professor of law at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. The article is adapted form a chapter in his book, The Cry of the Oppressed: The History and Hope of the Human Rights Revolution, Harper and Row, 1987. This article appeared in the Christian Century, August 12-19, 1987, pp. 683-687. Copyrighted by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This text was prepared for Relgion Online by John C. Purdy.

As one surveys the surge -- indeed, the explosion -- of human rights laws and activities over the past 40 years, one has to ask whether the overall level of public morality has been improved. The question is cosmic and probably unanswerable. But one of the many factors to be considered is the potential long-range consequences of the aspirations that have become a part of international law since the establishment of the United Nations. Torture, totalitarianism, political detention, the oppression of women, and massive malnutrition may still be tragically present in the universe. But have moral forces been launched that will eventually abate or abolish the inhumanity of these abuses of human rights? The broader question, of course, is whether any moral force has ever had any permanent effect on people’s morality since Cain killed Abel. But again we cannot say for certain, since we can only surmise how much worse things would be if the forces of morality had not been vigorously advanced through the centuries by human rights activists, jurists, legislators and individuals with humanitarian instincts.

One of the central global forces in seeking to create what is perceived to be a higher personal and public morality is, of course, religion. The United Nations Charter (1945) grouped religion with race, sex and language, and required all signatory nations to pledge to promote human rights without distinction as to these four. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Optional Protocol (1966), together called the International Bill of Rights, followed the same approach, adding the fight to freedom of thought and conscience to the conditions which may not be made the basis for any invidious discrimination.

But understandably, the elimination of intolerance and of discrimination based on religion or belief was perhaps the most difficult and intractable of all the UN’s aspirations. It was not until November 25, 1981, that the UN General Assembly was able to reach a consensus on the “Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion and Belief.” And then the final document was not a covenant or a treaty to be ratified by all UN member nations; it is only an article for informal agreement and common aspiration.

The Declaration on Religion seems to be more a Western document than do other UN covenants and treaties. At its core is its exaltation of tolerance and freedom of religion. The declaration notes that the denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion has “brought, directly or indirectly, wars and great suffering to mankind.” The General Assembly obviously does not feel called upon to inveigh against the reasons why religions have done things which, in the words of the declaration, “amount to kindling hatred between peoples and nations.” The document does not even bring up those reasons but urges only that there be “understanding, tolerance and respect in matters relating to freedom of religion and belief.” The norm for the conduct of religious groups is that they not use religion “for ends inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations” and its purposes and principles.

Is this a norm that has enough clarity and consistency to make a difference? Would Muslim nations or Protestant and Catholic forces in Belfast or militantly anticommunist nations like the United States be likely to come to the conclusion that they cannot impose their views about religion on others if in so doing they violate some of the UN’s principles? One hopes that the answer would be affirmative, but it is still too soon to try to assess whatever impact the 1981 UN statement on religious freedom may be having. . . .

It cannot be denied that the UN Declaration on Religion tends in the direction of the privatizing of religion. It states that in the event of a clash between what a religious group holds to be true, and the beliefs or nonbeliefs of another group, the principle of “tolerance” should be supreme. That principle has scarcely been a priority followed by all religions, and some would not agree to it now. One has to wonder, therefore, whether there will be an adverse reaction to the UN declaration. Will some militant religious sect reject its attitudes and its approach? Militant Muslims could maintain that the declaration tolerates and even exalts indifference, and that as a result it undermines the very foundation of national and international law and morality. Staunch anticommunists may feel that the declaration condones rather than condemns the Soviet war on religion. And secularists may feel that it is replete with “loopholes” by which religious zealots can justify the repression of disbelievers or dissidents. But in the end one has to say that if the General Assembly were to agree to anything concerning what international law should affirm with respect to human rights and religion, its 1981 declaration reflects what is perhaps the only approach available to 160 nations representing at least a dozen major world religions.

The UN document does, however, raise essential though probably unresolvable questions. Does it seek to create a certain supermorality based on human rights outside of formal religious structures? Does it tend to “paper over” the profound cultural and political differences in the approach of various nations to the role of religion in the formation of morality? Does it minimize the importance of these differences in clearly suggesting that they have to be subordinated to or sublimated by the ideal of promoting tolerance and understanding?

Although these issues are difficult, the UN Declaration on Religion does contain principles which merit applause and admiration. It states, for example, that every child is guaranteed the “right to have access to education in the matter of religion or belief in accordance with the wishes of his parents.” Moreover, the child shall “not be compelled to receive teaching on religion or belief against the wishes of his parents.” Other specific rights are protected; e.g., all people may observe days of rest and celebrate holidays in accordance with their religious traditions.

The United States clearly had an immense influence on the formation of the United Nations Charter and the International Bill of Rights. The U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are reflected in the Charter and the human rights covenants, which for the first time in history gave international effectiveness and enforcement to the aspirations of Western democratic states. The UN Declaration on Religion also reflects what the United States developed as a way to harmonize the interests of government and the objectives of religion. The Constitution’s First Amendment forbids an establishment of religion but maximizes the free exercise of both religion and irreligion. To some extent that is also the underlying formula of the UN declaration. The document does not prohibit state-sponsored religion, but it strongly advocates tolerance and expressly forbids any discrimination on the basis of religion or belief.

Can such a formula, applied throughout the world, allow diverse religions to flourish and in so doing create the necessary moral support to ensure the enforcement of a wide range of human rights? Or does the denial of an official status to any organized religion tend to inhibit that religion, so that it will not radiate those moral and spiritual values which are, by everyone’s admission, indispensable for the successful enforcement of internationally recognized human rights?

These are the questions which will be asked more and more -- especially by the Muslim nations where religion, government, law and morality are interwoven and inseparable in ways almost unknown to Western nations. In the literature about human rights, however, there is -- at least up to now -- -no pronounced rejection of the entire set of presuppositions on which the UN human rights covenants are grounded. Nations which have inherited Anglo-American or common law from the Commonwealth -- such as India -- feel comfortable with the international covenants, even though they were fashioned in large part by the former colonial powers. African nations are less comfortable with the UN covenants, but those covenant are not substantially dissimilar from the civil law or the Napoleonic Code which Belgium, France and Portugal brought to some African countries.

The nations of Asia theoretically feel less kinship with the premises and principles of the new international human rights law, but again there have been no strong protests from scholars or jurists in Asian lands. The millions living in former European colony nations should recognize that their liberation from the domination of a foreign power came about because of the widespread acceptance of the human rights and fundamental freedoms set forth in the documents of the United Nations.

The deepest and firmest conviction of those who drafted the International Bill of Rights was that there is a common and universal set of moral principles known or knowable to all human beings. For centuries the Catholic tradition has called that concept the natural moral law and has defined it as a participation by humanity in the eternal law rooted in God himself. Jurists and others perceive that tradition as deriving from the universal respect that people have or should have for the voice of conscience which can or should be heard by all human beings. Others would describe in somewhat different terms the moral assumptions underlying the UN human rights covenants. But it seems fair to state that in the vast array of diverse nations, there is some kind of consensus that accepts or at least does not reject the premises and the principles on which those covenants rest,

But, one has to ask, does this consensus stem from the religious tradition of these nations, or has it arisen despite or contrary to that tradition? And, equally important, can the contents of the International Bill of Rights endure and grow if the religious tradition of a nation or region is in fundamental opposition to it on, for example, the role of women in society or the way in which political dissidents are to be treated?

During the 40 years in which the International Bill of Rights developed, few took the time to think about these profound and troubling questions. In addition, they were not pressing, since the covenants did not become a part of world law until 1976. The hope was and is that all the world’s religious and moral traditions would continue to articulate their viewpoints and that somehow from all the different sounds a world symphony would be created. No one can say with finality whether that symphony is in the process of being created. But the dream and the vision of the international covenants’ framers continue to echo and inspire. The primary promises and pledges now contained in world law give hope to the humiliated, the marginalized, the dispossessed and the alienated. If such people become angry, they think of fighting for their rights. If they witness the degradation of other human beings by despots, they feel not only apprehension and anxiety but a determination to rise up against tyranny.

Nonetheless the question recurs: Can a worldwide morality and jurisprudence about human rights come to have a paramount influence when those rights are based not on theology or any organized religion but only on the rational commitment that all people are equal and should have equality and justice? In the history of the world it has almost always been assumed that the ultimate and permanent basis of a nation’s morality must rest on religion and be agreed to by the vast majority of its citizens. Except possibly for the United States -- although one could argue that the U.S. from 1790 to about 1950 was a de facto pan-Protestant nation -- nations have grounded their public morality in the people’s religious, ethnic and cultural roots.

Perhaps even that deep-rooted tradition has to be deemed an anachronism in a world where sovereign nations themselves may in many ways be anachronisms. In any event, the International Bill of Rights has bypassed the idea that all human rights derive from the morality or mystique of individual nation-states. Instead, it has proclaimed a wide variety of economic and political rights which are to be preferred in the event that any nation seeks to annul them as inconsistent with that nation’s sense of moral or legal priorities. It is a revolution that seeks to change something fundamental in the way nations have operated. It is a magnificent and beautiful experiment, which came to birth in 1976. Its feasibility and its chances of success are not very clear at this time. But in times past, the establishment of a set of rules or laws like the Code of Hammurabi, the Justinian Code, the Magna Carta or the U.S. Bill of Rights has eventually had an enormous impact. Consequently there are many reasons to think that the promulgation of the International Bill of Human Rights, while seemingly an act that could be perceived as naive and unrealistic, may be one of the most important events in world history.

But there is some reason to think that there may be a surprisingly clear and coherent consensus in the family of nations about the nature and enforceability of human rights? A review of some systems of law tends to confirm the idea that the framers of the International Bill of Rights were not just dreamers or superidealists; they were building on persistent and profound strands in the history of jurisprudence in the West and other cultures.

In 1968 UNESCO, to celebrate the International Year for Human Rights, published a collection of texts gleaned from different cultural traditions which illustrate the universality in time and space of the rights of humanity. The collection’s title, The Birthright of Man, reflects the idea that the struggle for human rights is as old as history itself. The desire to protect the individual from the abuse of power by a monarch, a tyrant or the state has its roots in the traditions and faiths of India, China, Japan, Persia (modern Iran), Russia and other nations.

The perennial conflict between the positive law of the sovereign and the unwritten law of the gods or of nature is seen in its classic form in Sophocles’s Antigone, in which the respect for the dead and the love of a brother transcend whatever the king might order.

In the Code of Hammurabi, 2,000 years before Christ, a monarch records that his mission is “to make justice reign in the kingdom, to destroy the wicked and the violent, to prevent the strong from opposing the weak . . . to enlighten the country and promote the good of the people.” And in the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the natural moral law formed the matrix for ideas about inalienable, indefeasible and imprescriptible human rights.

But while all the rhetoric and the reality of human rights law prior to the past 40 years may be impressive, one has to concede that the UN’s human rights covenants have taken a great leap forward. They contain a dream and a vision never really elaborated or espoused previously. The core of the human rights treaties can be discovered, at least in essence, in the history of law at the national level. But the notion of spelling out a code of rights to be enforced across the world is still a startling idea.

The dream of human rights appears to many to be utopian and almost unattainable because of the wretched conditions that exist in the world. For many reasons, human rights are often not being enforced. One of the major reasons is the buildup in arms during the 40 years since the human rights revolution began. The rise in the number of Third World military governments has had an adverse impact on human rights, since military-controlled governments are more than twice as likely as other Third World governments to make frequent use of torture and other violent forms of repression. In 1986 more than half of the world’s military governments regularly used torture, brutality, disappearances and political killings to intimidate their populations.

In 1986, the International Year of Peace, global military expenditures reached $900 million. The huge pyramid of public debt built up by military extravagance was to a great extent responsible for the fact that in 1986 at least 1 billion people were inadequately housed, every third adult could not read or write, and one person in five lived in grinding poverty.

The hemorrhage of resources consumed for arms means that a Hiroshima-like catastrophe occurs every three days: for example, 120,000 children die unnecessarily. This grim statistic reminds one of the adage that statistics are just people with their tears wiped away.

The number of casualties from war during the 40 years of the human rights revolution is appalling. According to Ruth Leger Sivard’s World Military and Social Expenditures, 1986 (World Priorities, 1986), 19.6 million persons were killed in World War I and 38.8 million in World War 11. But since 1945 about 25 million more have lost their lives in military conflicts, bringing the total killed in wars in this century to 83.6 million.

The United States in its role as the moral architect of the UN Charter and the human rights covenants certainly gave a creative impetus to law and idealism worldwide. But in the decades during which the U.S. has largely resisted ratification of UN treaties, it has established 300 major overseas military installations that cover 2 million acres and utilize 474,170 U.S. personnel (not including 250,000 U.S. service people aboard ship).

The person who suffers is carrying out St. Paul’s mysterious mandate that all of us must somehow help make up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ. For the Christian who believes in the solidarity -- indeed, the identification -- of every person with the humanity of the Son of God, the sufferings of that person will be a part of the redemption of the world. A brother or sister of Christ whose human rights are violated is a co-redeemer of the human race, an agent for the sanctification of Christ’s church and, as a child of God, one chosen in the unfathomable ways of divine providence to bear witness in ways that may never be comprehended by the person who suffers.

While this theology of suffering may at first seem to promote a certain indifference to the violation of human rights, it should not, if correctly understood, lead to a passive acceptance of the brutalities that people and governments inflict on innocent human beings. Properly interpreted, the Christian mysticism about suffering should galvanize the faithful to action because it is not merely human beings who suffer; it is Christ himself. It is literally true that if human sin and suffering had been less, Christ’s agony in the garden would have been less. At that moment Christ perceived all the abuses of human beings that would occur through the centuries, and he suffered personally for them. Consequently, if people can now diminish the level and number of affronts and abuses to the brothers and sisters of Christ, his suffering will be diminished.

Human rights activists operating in a secularized atmosphere do not make appeals to a theology or even a philosophy of human rights. They operate on those principles of humanitarianism and idealism that reflect universally accepted values in modern society. The law contained in the UN covenants is based on assumptions which are agreed to by the vast majority of humanity. It is further agreed that if these laws were strictly enforced, the abuse of human rights would be sharply curtailed. Some observers may wonder if these assumptions are adequate to the tasks involved. The worldwide consensus that the observance of human rights should be improved is so pervasive that the doubters and dissenters are not very visible. But it is self-evident that the human rights movement would be stronger still if it were buttressed by theological and philosophical underpinnings.

Those who believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition and perhaps the believers in any of the world’s religions-may argue that law will not be effective without love. They are right. Love, or the capacity to subordinate one’s own selfish interest to the good of others, is essential if civilization is not to revert to some form of human cannibalism. But law which can be defined as the enforcement of human rights is also the operating arm of love. Law is a feeble instrument even if it is strong and is supported by sanctions that will work. For without love, law has to rely on sheer deterrence or fear or threat -- and in those circumstances law will be evaded or avoided or ridiculed.

The quality of a society can be judged, Lord Moulton wrote, by its obedience to the unenforceable. Through the centuries human rights have not even been projected as enforceable by the world community. But now for the first time since humanity invented law, there is a plea for the internationalization of those fundamental rules or aspirations common to all people.

Even if all the human rights initiatives undertaken by the family of nations over the past two generations became miraculously effective, humanity still would not experience a return to some lost paradise forfeited by ancestral sin. But the implementation of human rights would be a way of curbing and civilizing all the brutish activities which derive from that primordial breakaway.

Americans have a unique role to play in the human rights revolution. It was the U.S., more than any other nation, that led the way to the formation of the United Nations and the development of that organization’s 20 or more treaties. It is the United States that transmitted the moral and philosophical bases of its own governmental institutions to the family of humankind. So it is the U.S. which has a daunting moral, legal and political duty to verify and enhance the transcendent nature of human rights. George Santayana said it well: “Being an American is in and of itself almost a moral condition.”

Another American -- lawyer, poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish -- epitomized the U.S. mandate in these words: “There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind are nothing but a dream. They are right. It is a dream. It is the American dream.”

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Our first classes of citizens (London Times, 970710)

David Alton says we need lessons in duties, not rights

Among the many issues raised by the new White Paper on Education, the most neglected has been the role of schools in forming citizens. There will be arguments about whether civics should reappear as a narrow subject looking at constitutional questions or whether a wider concern for citizenship should be integrated into every aspect of the school timetable. If an obligation is placed within the national curriculum, who will teach it, what new resources will be provided, will there be examinations and will inspectors assess its delivery?

But there will be little argument about the principle of educating for democracy and the importance of forming rounded citizens. The battle to redress the shrill language of rights and the flaccid rhetoric of entitlements with a richer concern for duties and responsibilities is almost won.

David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, was a member of the Weatherill commission on citizenship, which in 1990 declared that “citizenship should be a part of every young person’s education from the earliest years of schooling and continuing into the post-school years within further and higher education”. There is no reason to believe that Mr Blunkett’s views have changed.

The role of education in the formation of citizens became the central concern of Frances Lawrence after her husband, Philip, was stabbed to death outside his London school. Various publications Mrs Lawrence’s personal manifesto in The Times, David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty, Amitai Etzioni’s The Spirit of Community and The Politics of Hope by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks have each played a part in challenging the orthodoxies of individualism and rights.

At St Andrews, at Leicester, and at the John Moores University, Liverpool, there has been significant work on values, education and the development of citizenship. The Vice-Chancellor of John Moores, Professor Peter Toyne, says that “citizenship stems from the process of education”. His is the first British university to commit itself to developing concepts of citizenship among its students. The part played by formal education has also been recognised by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) and reflected in the establishment of the Values Education Council (VEC).

Historically, universities and schools recognised their role in preparing men and women for their private and public lives. However, one of the casualties of the rush towards a more individualistic approach has been civic responsibility. . Only in Britain would we turn “community service” into a punishment.

Even the narrow preparation for citizenship represented by civics courses in many secondary scoools has been lost. Now we need a sustained, rigorous and properly funded approach to replace the “mission statements” of many educational institutions which simply pay lip-service to citizenship.

For most young people, civic education is acquired through contacts with voluntary projects, their teachers, or because of an event or political policy which directly affects them. We must be far more systematic and ask tough questions about the purpose of education, about what is expected of democratic citizens, and about the skills we each require to live peaceably. It is part of the mission of a school or university to form men and women for others.

How a citizen acts as a moral agent affects everything from how they treat their environment and their neighbours to the pursuit of ethical standards in commerce or the embrace of civic duties. It is not a spectator sport or the preserve of a few well-meaning specialists.

These are not new concerns. For Aristotle, communal existence was not about forms of government but about the human qualities which made civic coexistence a possibility. Unlike Socrates, Aristotle believed that civic virtue could and should be taught. Cicero also saw the need for active participation: “The whole glory of virtue is in activity.”

The 20th-century Marxist obsession with production, the division of labour and class structures has been matched by individualistic indifference in our own times. The disfigurement of civic culture and the suppression of civil order have been the principal casualties. If a civil society is to withstand the ambitions of those who wish to usurp it, fundamental shared principals must be widely held and understood.

Every generation needs to address these same questions. In the 19th century, Carlyle called it “the condition of England question”. As we consider the condition of Britain’s 20th-century social ecology, these are the key questions which this welcome White Paper seeks to address.

Lord Alton, who was a Liberal Democrat MP for 18 years and is now Professor of Citizenship at John Moores University, Liverpool, took his seat in the House of Lords this week as a crossbencher.

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Legal experts slam top court’s Charter decisions (Globe & Mail, 980418)

Rights rulings called contradictory, chaotic; one lawyer says you might as well flip a coin

TORONTO ‑‑ A badly divided Supreme Court of Canada is producing a stream of barely comprehensible Charter of Rights decisions that have left lawyers in a state of confusion, several legal observers said yesterday.

While the court produced a startling number of ground‑breaking Charter decisions last year, they said, its reasoning and motivations are increasingly chaotic, conflicting and unpredictable.

Speaking at a conference on the 16th birthday of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the experts said it has become impossible for lawyers to instruct their clients on what to expect if they appeal to the top court.

“Every time I go to the Supreme Court of Canada, I haven’t a clue what will happen,” said Robert Hubbard, a lawyer for the federal Department of Justice. “The only trend I have seen is no trend.”

Mr. Hubbard said that on the eve of an appeal, he often finds himself unable to decide why a case is even being heard ‑‑ let alone what the court is likely to decide. “Flipping a coin is not bad way to proceed; at least you have a 50‑per‑cent chance of winning.”

Osgoode Hall law professor Jamie Cameron said that the court is as likely to quietly defer to Parliament as to stampede into areas of law that have not even been placed before it in the case it is hearing. “There is a lack of any principle to explain patterns of activism or deference in the past year. I can’t make heads nor tails of them from one case to another.”

Others said recent decisions have muddied the waters on the admissibility of evidence, seriously damaged the presumption of innocence and confused issues such as equality rights.

Mark Sandler, a Toronto criminal lawyer, said some critical areas of Charter jurisprudence have been rendered utterly incomprehensible by conflicting court judgments.

“I see no trend,” he told the conference, organized by York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. “I see no pattern. I see confusion and inconsistency.”

Peter Russell, a political scientist at the University of Toronto widely regarded as an authority on the Supreme Court, said it is as hard to discern patterns in the thinking of individual judges as it is to understand the overall direction of the court.

“I think a lot of the judges are without a deep philosophy of the Charter,” Professor Russell said.

He said a judge such as Mr. Justice Jack Major remains a complete enigma. “I can’t predict where people like [Judge] Major will end up. I cannot tell you his position on anything.”

Some at the conference said that despite their reservations they were heartened last year to see the court breathe new life into the Charter after a couple of years of dull and cautious judgments. The problem, they said, is that the jurisprudence tends to be so inconsistent and impenetrable.

Mr. Sandler and Osgoode Hall law professor Alan Young said the Supreme Court has done a particularly abysmal job of defining the instances in which evidence acquired through an unconstitutional act can still be used against an accused person.

Prof. Young said the public was shocked by two such cases last year in which people convicted of murder were freed because of evidentiary shortcomings. “I’m not really sure these represent the triumph of due process or a court that is really adrift in a sea of confusion,” he said.

Concluding his speech, Mr. Hubbard summed up: “Where are we going? Don’t know. Where have we been? Not sure.”

“Where are we now?” piped up a lawyer in the audience. “Don’t know,” Mr. Hubbard said dryly.

In partial defence of the court, Osgoode Hall law professor Patrick Monahan asked critics to remember that the court is required to adjudicate many of the thorniest issues.

Prof. Monahan produced statistics that shed light on trends in the court as well as marked differences in how individual judges approach Charter litigation. Some of his findings included: The court found a Charter violation in almost 60 per cent of the cases brought before it last year, far above its annual average of 26 per cent. Last year, none of the breaches were found to be justifiable in a free and democratic society. In 1996, half of all breaches were ruled to be justifiable.

Two of the three judges from Quebec are significantly less likely to go along with alleged Charter violations than is the rest of the court. The two, Madam Justice Claire L’Heureux‑Dubé and Mr. Justice Charles Gonthier, found an unjustifiable Charter breach in only 18 per cent of the cases before them. In contrast, Chief Justice Antonio Lamer found an unjustifiable breach in 37 per cent, while Mr. Justice John Sopinka ‑‑ who died late last year ‑‑ found one in 34 per cent of his cases. Chief Justice Lamer has carried the majority in 22 decisions he has written since 1974 and only written three dissents. Similarly, Mr. Justice Peter Cory has written 19 majority judgments and just one dissent during that period. However, Judge L’Heureux‑Dubé has written just two majority decisions and 17 dissents. Three judges ‑‑ Chief Justice Lamer, Judge Sopinka and Mr. Justice Gérard LaForest ‑‑ wrote half the judgments from 1994 to 1997. The death of Judge Sopinka and the retirement of Judge LaForest have accordingly left an enormous void. At the other end of the scale, Judge Major did not write a single judgment last year. Since 1994, he has written one majority and three minority judgments.

Almost 70 per cent of the cases emanating from the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal have been overturned by the Supreme Court in the past four years, a record only slightly less embarrassing than that for cases from the Quebec Court of Appeal. The appeal‑court decisions overturned the least often are those of Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Litigants who claim a violation of one of the criminal rights listed in the Charter ‑‑ such as the right to counsel or liberty ‑‑ are far more likely to succeed than those whose challenge involves equality rights or a fundamental freedom such as free speech or expression.

While Judge L’Heureux‑Dubé is the most conservative judge when it comes to finding Charter breaches in criminal cases, she is the most liberal when it comes to finding Charter breaches in the context of equality rights and other social issues. Judge LaForest and Judge Sopinka showed precisely the opposite traits.

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Activists around the world fighting for religious liberty (CNN, 980626)

Religious liberty has become a global crusade of the 1990s. While political freedom has blossomed in the post-Cold War world, new restrictions on religion - from city ordinances in the United States to sectarian violence abroad - have increased, a growing alliance of activists say.

The new enemies of religious liberty: nationalism, growing bureaucracies, resurgent Islam, holdout former Communist states and a backlash against the rise of pluralism in a growing number of countries around the globe.

Washington is getting a taste of the popular pull of the movement as two dozen bands staged a pair of huge concerts on June 13-14 at RFK Stadium to protest Chinese oppression of political and religious freedom in Tibet.

What unites this new chorus of voices defending religious rights, from the U.S. Congress to human rights activists and scholars of law and religion, is an effort to place the violations against freedom of faith, from the most minor to the most egregious, on one continuum of liberty.

“You could find people of almost any religion in the world who are being persecuted today,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, testified in House hearings on the issue last month.

New global freedoms have led to clashes involving old religious rivals and new proselytizers, said John Witte, director of Emory University’s law and religion program.

“It is one of the bitter fruits of the religious liberty revolution around the world,” he said.

Later this month, Mr. Witte will convene a Washington forum on “the problem of proselytizing in the new world order,” part of a three-year, problem-solving project.

Religious freedom also has been at the heart of several recent legislative battles on Capitol Hill.

To address such human rights violations abroad, the House has passed and the Senate is considering a bill that would require the Clinton administration to impose economic sanctions on nations that persecute believers.

On the domestic front, Republicans Rep. Charles T. Canady of Florida and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch of Utah introduced a bill to re-establish the protections for religious groups against burdens imposed by state and local government regulation -- reviving a 1993 law struck down by the Supreme Court just last year.

Such is the broad and diverse scope of the new interest in religious liberty, said Winston Frost, dean of Trinity Law School.

“In America, religious freedom is about accommodation to menorahs and creches and discussions in public schools,” he said. “Elsewhere in the world, it means giving your life for what you believe.”

Nearly every nation pays homage in its constitution to freedom of conscience and belief, and most have signed the postwar Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“What our battle is about is to promote the reality of religious freedom as opposed to amending constitutions,” said Bruce Casino, president of the International Coalition for Religious Freedom.

He said the tension between those promises of freedom and a regime’s need to keep “public order” is central to the loss of liberty.

The primacy of public order now is being evoked by increasing numbers of government authorities even in the developed democracies of Western Europe, said Jurgen Warnke, a Frankfurt lawyer with the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief.

He cited an Austrian law passed in December that creates three tiers of legality, excluding such well-known denominations as Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses from some social privileges and relegating newer faiths, from Scientology to Hare Krishna, to private worship alone.

“This is not in compliance with international agreements,” Mr. Warnke said.

He said nations in Eastern Europe think differently about legal protections for religion. In Romania, he said, a draft constitution includes 18 legal religions but no individual religious rights.

A new Russian law, enacted in September, also puts a priority on public order over liberty. Four historic religions are given special status, while the Catholic Church is a minority that must register to operate legally. Churches that were not registered 15 years ago cannot now obtain legal status.

“Each parish must register, and whether there will be problems has to do with local officials,” said Archbishop Thaddaeus Kondrusiewicz, the spiritual leader of Catholics in Russia. “Practically, missionary activity by us is forbidden.”

If Orthodoxy is predominant in the East, Catholicism is the controlling heritage in Latin America.

“Twenty Latin American republics guarantee religious freedom, including Cuba,” said the Rev. Julio Lillan, a Pentecostal in Venezuela and head of the Interdenominational Evangelical Federation.

Yet even in the new democracies, he noted, a growing religious nationalism has led Catholics in government to curtail the rights of Protestant evangelicals working in their countries.

But government suspicions of competing religious groups in Europe and Latin America pale next to active official state persecution of believers in many countries.

Human rights experts say the persecution has reached its deadly zenith in Sudan, where 1.5 million Christians, animists and moderate Muslims have been killed by the state policy of Islamic fundamentalists.

Nina Shea of Freedom House, a human rights watchdog group, said this has been the worst century in history for persecution of Christians.

“In sheer absolute numbers, this century has also been one of the bloodiest, if not the bloodiest, for Jews, Buddhist and Baha’is,” she added. “In the current period, the Middle East is one of the fiercest opponents of religious minorities.” In Saudi Arabia, secret police monitor homes for outlawed Christian worship services and immigrant workers who violate the ban reportedly have been beheaded, she said.

“Muslim societies are not uniformly hostile to religious minorities,” Miss Shea said, noting that Jordan allows religious education for Christians in its public schools.

The growing abuses in predominantly Islamic nations have inspired a backlash against Muslim immigrants, who number 8 million in Western Europe.

In Frankfurt, Germany, recently, the mayor refused a Muslim request to build a mosque because in Turkey the government has stood by as Muslim mobs burned Christian churches.

In Asia’s young democracies, religious tolerance typically relies on political stability, said Michael Young of Columbia University.

“The higher the degree of legitimacy, the higher the government’s confidence in its ability to rule, the more space it gives religion,” Mr. Young said. “The less confidence and the lower degree of legitimacy, the persecution tends to increase rather dramatically.”

Communist China’s new 1994 law, which seeks to control recurring outbreaks of religion expression among the masses, has become a new kind of regulatory system, Mr. Young said.

The law says religion cannot “disrupt the unification of the country, national unity or social stability.” Analysts say officials in Beijing adopted this approach after seeing the key role played by church leaders in Eastern Europe in the collapse of Communist regimes in the late 1980s.

Mr. Young lauded Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines for their tolerance of differing religions.

Yet even the democracies of the world have tightened the screws on religious pluralism.

Israel’s Orthodox parties ban non-Orthodoxy clergy and last month the Knesset passed the first reading of an anti-missionary law with a three-year jail sentence for anyone trying to change someone’s religion.

Western Europe, preparing for economic and regulatory unity within the European Union, has narrowed the definition of religion, said Massimo Introvigne, a Catholic lawyer and professor who heads the Center for the Study of New Religions in Turin, Italy.

“In order to maintain this facade of religious freedom in European countries, they say some groups are not a religion,” he said

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United States Regains Its Spine at the United Nations (Concerned Women for America, 010201)

During the past eight years, the United States delegation to the United Nations has been a pawn for leftist interest groups. It joined JUSCANZ in pushing “reproductive and sexual rights” for children as young as age 10, acceptance of “all forms of families,” namely homosexual, and even legalization of prostitution, eliciting a letter of disapproval from U.S. lawmakers last year. With the changing of the guard, the United States is singing a new tune at the United Nations—much to the chagrin of pro-abortion, pro-homosexual rights groups. The family now has a voice in this global body, and the United States is its megaphone.

On the fourth day of the second meeting of the preparatory conference (prepcom) at the World Summit for Children, the United States stepped to the microphone to chip in its thoughts on the outcome document. Nations’ delegates and nongovernmental organization (NGO) members greatly anticipated the statement. The statement was a great victory for pro-family, pro-life people of faith.

Now that the United States has made such a definitive statement before the United Nations at the beginning of this new administration, we must encourage President George W. Bush to continue this momentum throughout the rest of his term.

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Liberal Intolerance Where the Left failed in Kindergarten (National Review, 011022)

Since September 11, the public has been lectured repeatedly that the United States is at war with terrorists who have hijacked the Islamic faith, not with Muslims, and that Arab and Muslim Americans must be treated with tolerance and respect. This is good advice, although most Americans already live by the Golden Rule.

But there are those who have little tolerance and respect for the rights of others. And I’m not talking about the obvious hate-mongers, such as neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the skinheads — all of which are well known, detestable enemies of democracy. No, I’m talking about the intolerance of the Left, which professes to support civil liberties. Here are some worthy examples:

The Sacramento Bee reports that the American Civil Liberties Union is demanding that Breen Elementary School in Rocklin, California, remove a “God Bless America” sign from its property, which the school displayed in response to the terrorist atrocities of September 11. The ACLU claims that the words broadcast a “hurtful, divisive message.” “By displaying a religious message, the Breen Elementary School is dividing its young students along religious lines.” At least for now, Breen’s principal has not buckled to the pressure, announcing that he has no intention of removing the message from school grounds.

The ACLU also tried recently to stop the Commonwealth of Virginia from implementing its minute of silence policy for public-school students. The pupils can use the time for quiet reflection, meditation, or — and here’s the supposed rub — silent prayer. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the state law. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, speaking for the Court, wrote, in part, that “There is no allegation that Virginia schoolteachers have used the minute of silence, or any other occasion, to lead students in collective prayer.” God forbid if they had.

A few weeks ago, the Madison, Wisconsin, school board banned the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner from its classrooms. The AP reports that proponents of the ban argued that the pledge’s phrase — “one nation, under God” — is inappropriately religious, and the national anthem’s lyrics are militaristic. Public pressure forced the school board to reverse course. However, prior to reciting the pledge or singing the anthem, students must first be informed that their participation is voluntary. We wouldn’t want to offend anybody.

The Boy Scouts of America, a private organization, determined that the appointment of openly gay scout leaders violates its mission and purpose. The Supreme Court upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to freedom of association under the First Amendment. Now, the group is the target of a well-orchestrated campaign to ban it from the public square — particularly from public schools. Just a few days ago, the Seattle Times reported that “Garfield High School’s Outdoor Education program has broken away from the Boy Scouts because its student leaders object to a Boy Scout policy that bans openly gay leaders and members.”

Did you know that the ROTC is prohibited from appearing on numerous college campuses? In New York alone, the ROTC is banned from Columbia University, New York University, and the City University of New York. Harvard University chased the ROTC off campus thirty-two years ago. The September 11 attacks have prodded 900 alumni to petition Harvard to reinstate the corps, but to no avail — yet.

And then there’s the case of a Jewish elementary-school teacher who was removed from her second-grade classroom the other day by the liberal New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy. Apparently, parents, most of whom are Arab Americans, complained that she made anti-Arab comments. According to the New York Post, one of the parents complained that the teacher “told our kids she went to Israel and that Palestinian children threw rocks at her.” The teacher said, “I do remember saying, ‘terrorism is unusual to us, but this is how everyday life is in Israel.” “I didn’t teach anti-Arab. I taught antiterrorism.” The Board of Education is now investigating the teacher. I wonder if truth is a defense to political correctness?

Yes, we need tolerance in America. So, when will the Left practice it?

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U.S. Delegates Hold the Line on Family-Friendly Language (Concerned Women for America, 020101)

The delegates emerged late Tuesday night from their closed-door negotiations only to announce they had gotten nowhere. Those opposed to language showing respect for families and in support of abortion rights wouldn’t budge, as advocates for the family and the dignity of human beings — with the United States in the lead — could not back down. This meant that on Wednesday, the celebrated opening day of the World Summit on Children, there would be no finished document to herald.

The U.S. is championing language affirming that marriage is between a husband and wife, that the family is the basic unit of society and should be respected, and that the primary responsibility for the protection, upbringing and development of children rests with the family.

The European Union and the Rio Group (composed of Latin American countries) are demanding language (“reproductive health services”) that has been previously defined as meaning abortion. They also will not accept language, in a paragraph dealing with the family, that includes marriage.

For over a year the debate over language on the family and abortion raged in numerous preparatory conferences leading up to the World Summit. But a new issue was thrown into the mix on Tuesday — one that, when introduced by the European Union, was described by one delegate as like a “molotov cocktail” being thrown into the room. That is, that nations must not allow the death penalty for criminals who committed their crime before their 18th birthday.

Several states in America allow this penalty for heinous crimes. U.S. delegates to the United Nations, who are not elected, have no authority to overrule state laws, and the United Nations has no right to demand such a thing. So U.S. delegates cannot agree to this language.

At an impasse, the Chairman announced Wednesday morning that the delegation would not meet again until 4:00 p.m. This left the delegates free to meet informally to come to an agreement.

While waiting for this evening session, pro-family advocates made an explosive discovery — UNICEF curricula printed and distributed to minors in Mexico that promoted abortion as reproductive health services, masturbation, and that described sex with animals, objects and children as normal. UNICEF is the sponsor and organizer of the World Summit on Children.

Pro-family advocates translated relevant portions of the books, and attached a cover letter explaining that this is apparently what UNICEF believes falls under “children’s rights.” These were handed out to delegates on Wednesday evening.

At a briefing for U.S. non-government organizations on Wednesday afternoon, U.S. delegates outlined a list of unresolved issues. Reproductive health services, the family, language that would require the U.S. to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the juvenile death penalty, and child labor issues.

Mike Dennis, the lead negotiator, explained how the U.S. is pushing for language that would be more protective of children, and the European Union is arguing for lower standards. The U.S. introduced wording that details ways to improve children’s situations, for example on child prostitution and child pornography, but other nations merely want references to vague language.

Negotiations continued into Wednesday evening, as high-level dignitaries continued giving speeches in the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children.

==============================

If we have rights, God gave us them (Ottawa Citizen, 020705)

When George W. Bush said rights come from God, people recoiled as though he’d used “drug” as the past tense of “dragged,” which he also did. So in case his remarks on the origin of rights strike you as not just wrong but wrong-headed, uncouth as well as uninformed, I’d like to remind you that T. S. Eliot also said “If you will not have God ... you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

That won’t bother those who don’t believe in rights at all. But what about what J. Budziszew-ski in the latest First Things calls the “Second Tablet project,” the attempt to have objective commandments against things like murder, theft, greed and so on that do not depend on God? On Tuesday, my colleague Kate Heartfield took issue with Mr. Bush from precisely this perspective. “These rights are inherent to humans, whether they are recognized or not ... Why do humans have these rights? Because they do.” They exist, she added, “whether God or the government says so or not.”

What reason can you give for the claim that it’s wrong for the government to torture and murder you? Because you say so? Even before they pull the trigger, what makes your assertion of rights anything but an expression of desire? The Randian claim that we have rights because “we are volitional beings” is at bottom an attempt to squeeze truth out of the universe by force of will. You might as well try to squeeze chocolate out of a stone.

Why is Kate any better off trying to squeeze rights out of God? She said “If God gave us our rights, presumably God can take them away.” That would be true if she worshipped a God like Zeus, who would give her not rights but privileges. The basic moral structure of all paganism is that you better give the gods nice stuff or they’ll do you like dinner. But such gods could not withstand Christ because they’re as silly as they are scary.

God isn’t that sort of being at all. He is the moral structure of the universe. He can’t take away our rights because God can’t change the moral law without ceasing to be God and that’s a logical rather than factual impossibility. He can’t even feel like taking them away.

Getting rights from God, instead of the state, the United Nations Charter or my own desires, isn’t like getting milk from the cafeteria instead of a store or the fridge. It’s like getting it from a cow. The only way you can have rights rather than privileges (or merely luck) is if there’s something self-evidently rather than derivatively good, something that’s a source of light rather than merely well lit.

I’m not trying at this point to deal with the claim that there’s no God, and no rights. Frankly, atheism reminds me of the apocryphal story of a woman hearing Bertrand Russell lecture on cosmology and saying “Don’t you know the earth sits on the back of a turtle?” “And what’s that turtle sitting on?” he asks. “You can’t fool me, Mr. Russell, it’s turtles all the way down.” Without a God who is Being itself, I don’t see how you can have a universe at all. But all I’m saying at the moment is if rights do exist, they must come from God. And I’m saying it to people like Kate who insist that rights do exist.

The only possible answers to the question “Why do you have rights?” are “Because I say so” and “Because God says so.” And the crucial difference is that He has a right to say so and I don’t. “Because I say so” invites the response “What gives you the right to say so?” and it’s turtles all the way down. But God is the right to say so. He’s the turtle that rests on Himself.

I concede that we can’t be sure exactly what God is saying. But we don’t stop trying just because it’s hard. We may see through a glass darkly, but we see something and it isn’t just our own reflection. Luckily.

In addition to being an untenable account of where rights come from, Kate’s is an untenable definition of rights. Unless there is a God who wipes away all tears in another, better world, what’s the difference between “I have a right not to be murdered” and “I don’t want to be murdered”? The victims of the Holocaust are no less dead for having the right to life.

As Budziszewski says, “‘Do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences’ makes sense only on the assurance that he will take care of the consequences. Without that assurance, doing the right thing means taking care of the consequences -- or trying to.”

Even doing the right thing consistently is beyond us. But trying to take care of all the consequences forces us to play God and start deciding who deserves to live and die, getting it wrong, and taking people’s rights away because we feel like it. If we start playing God, we become the God Kate fears. We don’t just get Hitler, we are Hitler.

So it’s God or Hitler, Ten Commandments or none. That shouldn’t be too hard a choice.

John Robson is Senior Editorial Writer and Columnist.

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ERA Anniversary Renews Familiar Arguments (Foxnews, 030131)

WASHINGTON — Disaster was averted when the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was finally defeated two decades ago, thanks in large part to Phyllis Schlafly, friends and admirers of the anti-feminist activist said Thursday night.

In fact, said supporters at the 30th annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference, if not for Schlafly’s successful efforts to prevent 38 states from ratifying the constitutional amendment, the United States might be sending mothers off to combat in Iraq today.

“Women would have been subject to the draft, they would have been in combat,” said Elaine Donnelly, head of the Center for Military Readiness, who was on hand to fete Schlafly.

Donnelly, whose group believes that women do not have the same virility of men to perform high-risk jobs in the military, said Schlafly not only stopped the ERA, but went head-to-head with the liberal feminist tidal wave that marked the 1970s.

“That was the first time that a major liberal initiative was stopped cold,” Donnelly said. “She made it happen.”

That conclusion is subject to considerable astonishment from feminist groups.

Schlafly did not defeat the amendment, countered Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority who fought for the ERA during that critical time in the 1970s. Big business interests like the insurance industry knocked down the amendment even as they were “hiding behind her skirts,” Smeal said.

“We opened doors for women. She didn’t open doors for women. She slammed them shut. It’s been a constant right-wing attack,” she said.

“Everyone was hostile,” Schlafly said of reaction to her campaign, but it “forced the feminists to spend their time attacking me.”

Speaking from the dais at her tribute dinner Thursday, Schlafly, 78, looked more the part of the grandmother than a liberal iconoclast. Attempting to project that softer image while lobbying on Capitol Hill during the 1970s, Schlafly had her anti-ERA troops bake bread for members of Congress.

But the mother of six, who worked her way through college as a munitions tester, made her mark on the ERA landscape by confronting the mother of the feminist movement, Betty Friedan, and charging state-by-state with a bullhorn to make her case.

In 1972, the ERA was on the verge of passage. The amendment, which had been introduced into and failed to pass every Congress since 1924, finally succeeded in the House and Senate.

It had the support of future President Gerald Ford, followed by President Jimmy Carter, as well as “99 percent of the media,” Schlafly said.

But the amendment was a smokescreen, she said, that while pretending to ensure that rights are not abridged because of gender, “it would allow federal power over all traditional differences between men and women.”

Schlafly, who still heads the Eagle Forum, a pro-family, anti-abortion watchdog she created in 1975, argues that the ERA would have not only resulted in a female draft, it would have taken away rights to automatic child custody, created coed prisons, erased sex crime laws protecting women, and spurred litigation and judicial activism to a whole new level.

Smeal called that assertion “a gross misstatement,” adding that too many loopholes in current federal anti-discrimination laws continue to harm women.

“There would have been more education opportunities. Pension plans would have been more even, birth control would be covered in insurance plans,” among other things, Smeal said.

With only 35 of the 38 states ratifying the amendment before the 1982 deadline, the ERA died, felled during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was elected in part because of his opposition to it.

“She showed it for the emperor with no clothes,” said former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. “She was very articulate, she knew the issue backwards and forwards and she worked very hard.”

An author since 1964, Schlafly recently released her 20th book, a scathing attack on liberal feminism entitled Feminist Fantasies.

Her group still actively opposes the ERA, which was re-introduced in the last Congress by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. That version died in committee.

“It has no value – all of the legitimate equality that [feminists] have purportedly achieved has already been achieved legislatively,” said Helen Blackwell, head of the Virginia Eagle Forum. “Any further gender or sex equality laws would actually harm women.”

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Supreme Mocking: Scalia on the Court (NRO, 031027)

The Associated Press reported last Friday that “Scalia Ridicules Gay Sex Ruling” at a dinner sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The article’s implication was that extreme right-wingers beyond closed doors were mocking — from their position far outside the mainstream — our Supreme Court’s “recent ruling legalizing gay sex.” That’s because, it would seem, conservatives think that the idea of legal gay sex is ridiculous.

Well, I attended that lecture, and Scalia didn’t say anything in private that he hasn’t said in public, in his scathing dissenting opinions. And what he ridiculed deserved, from any serious constitutional perspective, to be ridiculed. But it wasn’t the idea of legal gay sex.

AP reporter Anne Gearan observed, quite accurately, that “Scalia adopted a mocking tone to read from the Court’s June ruling that struck down state anti-sodomy laws in Texas and elsewhere.” But for some reason she decided not to quote the passage that Scalia thought deserved that tone. Here are those words penned by Justice Kennedy: “Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibility, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

Those words are ridiculous as a justification for the Court’s exercise of judicial review, for striking down a law passed by Congress or a state legislature. The authors of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Kennedy claims, had no “insight” into any “specific” understanding of what liberty is. They knew that they were, because of their times, necessarily blind to some of the “manifold possibilit[ies] of liberty, and so they left the meaning of the principle open. It might then be “invoked” by “later generations” as part of “their own search for greater freedom.” That means, for Justice Kennedy, that the Supreme Court has the right and duty to expand the meaning of liberty pretty much however it judges best at any particular time.

Some say that our Constitution is a reflection of the leading Framers’ indebtedness to the philosophy of John Locke, or to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that guided Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence. That view, even if true, would be of little interest to Justice Kennedy. Everyone knows that all the thinkers of the past were blind to “certain truths” that our generation can so readily see. All the Framers and philosophers of old gave us was the idea of liberty, and they left the Court free to define it for our time.

The power of the Supreme Court grows over time, for Kennedy, as what once seemed “necessary and proper” now seems oppressive. The Court need only invoke the Constitution in a very abstract way in searching for ways to bestow more and more freedom upon us. Justice Kennedy’s ridiculous and shamelessly imperialistic assertion really is that the Court is in no specific way disciplined or limited by the Constitution at all.

Justice Scalia, in his dissent in the recent sodomy case (Lawrence v. Texas), does not deny or even bemoan the fact that “[s]ocial perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time.” And he notes without judgment that “homosexuals have achieved some success” in their effort to persuade their fellow Americans that “consensual homosexual acts” should be perfectly legal. He even observes that it’s true enough that laws that seem necessary and proper to one generation often seem oppressive to another. Later generations are, under our Constitution, perfectly free to repeal such laws.

But that liberty is given by the Constitution to the people, not to the Court. There is nothing in the Constitution that allows the Court to read into the Constitution views of liberty that have no specific textual support and would not have occurred to its Framers. To say otherwise would allow justices — who are by profession nothing but lawyers — to be philosophers, the sort of philosophers who pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of the spirit of their time. That means, in practice, that justices in their pride become captive, as Justice Scalia said in his lecture, “to the latest academic understanding of liberal political theory.” And the shallow and naive way they so often understand trendy theory shows their pride to be mostly vanity.

Insofar as justices turn the constitutional text into liberal or libertarian principle, they must, as Scalia complains in his dissent, “carry things to their logical conclusion.” That means, in our time, they cannot really stop at legalizing all homosexual activity, but they must move on to find a constitutional right to gay marriage, to in fact anything — even polygamy or polyandry — that consenting adults have an inclination to do. By understanding liberty as an abstract or radically individualistic principle, the Court cannot help but dissolve over time all the social institutions and moral restraints embodied in the law.

One advantage of leaving as much choice as possible about what is “necessary and proper” and what is “oppressive” to the people is that they don’t have to follow the logic of liberty or radical individualism to its conclusion. They can, Scalia observes, decide to legalize gay sex but the draw the line before gay marriage. Or they might go as far as gay marriage but leave the non-individualistic assumptions of marriage law itself in tact. The Constitution, for the most part at least, leaves it to the people to compromise between individual liberty and social or moral responsibility at any particular time.

Scalia’s constitutional view is not that the legalization of gay sex or even gay marriage is ridiculous. But he did well to mock the idea that there is anything in the Constitution that allows the Court to declare a “constitutional right” that the people are bound to accept.

— Peter Augustine Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College. He is author of Aliens in America: The Strange Truth About Our Souls.

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Against C-250 (David Warren, 031204)

Svend Robinson’s private member’s bill, C-250, was passed too quickly by our House of Commons. It is now before the Senate. It is a serious immediate threat to freedom of speech in Canada, and a dangerous precedent for the future.

The bill adds “sexual orientation” to a list which already includes race, colour, and religion. It makes it illegal to advocate “genocide” against identifiable groups. This is adding an apple to a list of oranges. Race and colour, even the religion in which we are raised, are integral parts of being human. Sexual choice is not -- it’s something you do, not something you are.

We have always had laws against incitement to violence. The creation of a new law for such a special purpose is thus an invitation to our very activist courts to define “incitement” more broadly and vaguely. An amendment excludes those who oppose homosexuality for religious reasons -- but again, courts are likely to define religious belief ever more narrowly, thus stripping it away as a defence.

Even today, 34 years after our sodomy laws were overturned by the Trudeau government, traditional observers of all religious faiths present in Canada, and many non-traditional and non-religious people as well, believe homosexual acts are morally wrong. They do not agree that homosexuality is an “identity question”. They can also dispute all the pseudo-science brought forward to push that idea. Bill C-250 can only be intended as a new way of shutting them up.

It does not follow that people who condemn homosexuality want homosexuals to be persecuted. For the same people who condemn homosexuality, also condemn adultery. It doesn’t mean they want adulterers lynched. The Church itself teaches us to condemn the sin, but not the sinner.

The idea of equality before the law is among the many other products of our beleaguered Christian heritage. People are not equal because they are Catholic, or Jewish, or black, or white, or old, or young, or heterosexual, or homosexual, but because they are human. That, according to our deepest principle of liberty, is why you can’t murder them, or rob them, or libel them, or spit on them. And I do not know a single soul who believes that homosexuals are not human.

Bill C-250 thus flies in the face of BOTH our traditional moral beliefs AND our secular legal principles.

In my view, a law which restricts freedom of speech, while turning the traditional moral order upside down, is worth defeating, even in the Senate.

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December’s C-Word (NR, 031231)

Who would have thought that ‘Christmas’ would become verboten? (Don’t answer that)

JAY NORDLINGER

When you go to Capitol Hill, you’d better not call the Christmas tree the Christmas tree: It’s the “Capitol Holiday Tree,” and that’s official. (Hang on, aren’t the Republicans in charge?) The White House is still holding firm, however: The tree over which it presides remains the National Christmas Tree.

I don’t know about y’all in the more Neanderthal parts of America, but in the less Neanderthal, “Christmas” is pretty gauche. When you say “Merry Christmas,” you might better have belched. On a recent Sunday, I attended a Christmas concert at Lincoln Center (New York) — the soprano Deborah Voigt was singing with the New York Philharmonic. The program said “holiday concert,” of course. But a poster outside said “Christmas Concert.” Apparently, someone had not quite gotten with the program (so to speak) — hope he wasn’t fired!

A lot of us have been irked by “Happy Holidays,” in place of “Merry Christmas,” for a long time. Many years ago, I was working at a large firm in Washington, and it was “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Holidays,” until you wanted to scream. One afternoon, just before Christmas, I said to a friend there, “Merry Christmas.” I said it in a soft, gentle, but kind of mischievous way. He just grinned at me, understandingly. You would have thought we were engaging in something subversive, which was just plain weird.

Incidentally, Thanksgiving may be in trouble — I mean, the word. A couple of years ago, as I was touching down in my home state, the stewardess (oops, there I go again) said, “And a happy holiday to everyone.” She meant Thanksgiving. But the word seemed a little risky, somehow. More and more, I hear, after that long weekend, “Did you have a good holiday?” Et tu, Thanksgiving?

It’s astonishing how many people have internalized the “holiday” business. At that Debbie Voigt concert, I was with a friend who said, at intermission, “I just love the holiday.” I had to say, “You mean Christmas?” And she said, “Yes! That’s what I mean! How did I get out of the habit of saying that?” One does. It’s even possible to be proud. When I was in college, a kid came back to the dorm and announced, beaming, “Today, I said the president and his spouse” — meaning Ronald and Nancy Reagan — “and I didn’t even have to think about it. It came naturally.” He was in no danger of saying wife.

Every December, I write about holidayitis, and so do loads of others. In fact, there’s a vast literature on this subject, if “literature” is not too grand a word for Internet kvetching and other popular expressions of protest. A website called GrinchList.com is fairly typical — it was created “in response to” a “growing censorship” and to “revisionist policies and practices concerning Christmas,” evident in stores, schools, offices, and media. Yes, there’s fed-uppery in the land. And National Review readers are among the feddest up. How do I know? Because on our website recently — NationalReview.com — I invited readers to give examples of holiday/Christmas outrages, or annoyances, and they responded with a thunderous yawp.

As several readers tell it, even ushers in church, reflexively, wish people a “happy holiday.” They have to be reminded, “We’re in our own church! It’s okay to say ‘Merry Christmas’!” One man pointed out that the Salvation Army’s mission is, in its words, “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name.” Yet while our reader was bell-ringing, he was admonished by a co-worker not to say “Merry Christmas.”

And how about those Christmas trees? Everywhere, they’re called “holiday trees,” but in some places they’re called “unity trees,” “culture trees,” or even “seasonal conifers.” A high-school activities director wrote to me, “Every year we have a program once known as The Giving Tree.” (This has to do with helping needy families.) “But a tree is apparently a potent religious symbol, capable of inducing alienation, or even conversion.” So The Giving Tree became The Giving Snowman — which became The Giving Snowperson. No, really.

In the workplace, “Christmas” is a faux pas, at best. One company lists its holidays thus: “New Year’s Day, Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day [yes], and December 25th.” December 25th. These people could not bring themselves to utter the C-word. Christmas parties are out, and in are, of course, holiday parties, seasonal gatherings, and end-of-year celebrations. A man writes, “My law firm does a ‘Christmas in April’ charity event. But it’s ‘holiday’ at Christmas! I’d like them to do a ‘Christmas in April’ in December for a change.” One company decided to avoid naming holidays altogether: Now they just have “scheduled down days.”

Schools? Gimme a break. Christmas may not be mentioned in the properly modern American school. A Christmas party is apt to be a “snowflake social.” And the Christmas concert has gone the way of the McGuffey Reader, or slate: These are winter concerts, with nothing too Jesusy, please, or maybe “nights of seasonal entertainment” (a new one on me).

Well, surely you’re left with a Secret Santa, aren’t you? Nice, secular Santa? No way. Mr. Claus is entirely too Christmas-specific. At a Harvard dorm, they were going to have a Secret Santa, but orthodoxy asserted itself, and the name was changed to Secret Winter Snow Friend. My correspondent says, “I made a plea on behalf of all anagram lovers that we compromise and use the name ‘Secret Satan.’” Elsewhere, Secret Santas have become Winter Wizards.

For years, the City of Pittsburgh had “Sparkle Season,” complete with a mascot, Sparkle, who, it was widely observed, looked rather like a flamboyant Klansman. Now they have, simply, “Downtown Pittsburgh: A Holiday Tradition with a New Twist.” (Sparkle was twist enough for me.) In San Diego, “Christmas on the Prado” has become “December Nights.” Other localities hold a “Frost Time Festival.” The euphemisms are almost invariably gag-making.

Business is playing ball, too — oh, is it. Roughly a million readers wrote me to protest a TV ad from a pet-product company. A husband is teasing his wife about all the presents she’s bought for their dog. “But it’s his first holiday!” she pleads. Really? Wasn’t he around for Veterans Day? Starbucks sells both “Christmas Blend” and “Holiday Blend,” depending. Depending on what, I’m not quite sure. And in card sections of supermarkets, you may see “Birthday,” “Graduation,” “Hanukkah,” etc., and then — once more — “December 25th.” The naming of all other holidays seems kosher. Even Easter.

Among our readers, a great many Jews said, essentially, “If you’re saying ‘holiday’ on my account, please stop! It grates!” In my experience, the more religious, or even culturally serious, a person is, the more he’s apt to dislike “Happy Holidays.” The blandly generic has no taste. And I salute the reader who wrote, “Have you ever attended someone else’s party — someone’s birthday, anniversary, graduation? It wasn’t your event, but didn’t you share the joy? That’s how I feel. I’m not Christian, but I look forward to Christmas every year. Especially the music.”

Ah, the music, and what’s happened to it: That’s a whole ‘nother volume of complaint.

Many traditionalists seize on the fact that “holidays” derives from “holy days,” so, really, the joke’s on those who think that they’re skirting something with “holidays.” True: and “decimate” used to mean one of every ten, blah, blah, blah. There is no great etymological comfort.

But if it’s comfort you want, you may look to the White House, and its current occupant. A peppy lady in Connecticut says, “Before the lighting of the National Christmas Tree, the TV commentators were going on and on about a ‘festival of lights’ and the ‘holiday tree’ and all that. And then the president comes on, and he says ‘Christmas’ about a jillion times, and even worse stuff, like ‘star in the East’ and ‘God’s purpose.’ It was thrilling!”

Forgive me for ending on a political note — even in a political magazine — but I must ask: Do you have the feeling that George W. Bush is the last un-PC — even anti-PC — president we’ll ever have? He calls terrorists terrorists, when he’s not calling them evildoers. He says “Merry Christmas” with abandon (I happen to know). Put it this way: If, sometime before 2009, the National Christmas Tree has switched to National Holiday Tree, Bush did not win the 2004 election.

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Vatican’s New Lexicon Joins War of Words (Concerned Women for America, 030402)

Homosexual Activists Assail Document that Clarifies Loaded Sexual Terms

A new Vatican dictionary that says homosexuality is a condition “without any social value” and that people with “profoundly disordered minds” inhabit countries that allow gay “marriages” is drawing outrage from homosexual activists.

The new document, titled “Lexicon On Ambiguous and Colloquial Terms About Family Life and Ethical Questions,” also says that homosexuals have “not stopped proclaiming, often in disproportionate if not aggressive ways, their normality.”

Published Monday in Italian by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Family, the 1,000-page glossary clarifies 78 key terms related to sexuality, abortion, genetic manipulation and birth control whose core meanings are antithetical to Church teaching. Translations will be published later this year.

The lexicon warns against concepts such as “safe sex”; “reproductive health,” a code word for abortion; “domestic economy,” instead of reduction of births; and “sustainable family growth,” which means contraception. It states that condoms do not protect against some sexually transmitted diseases, calling their use “an exercise in self-justification.”

Italian homosexuals were quick to condemn the new dictionary. Franco Grillini, an Italian Parliament member and founder of the homosexual rights group Arcigay, said the dictionary exposes “the pathological homophobic obsession of the Catholic Church,” according to news reports.

Referring to the lexicon’s statements about condoms, “gay” Italian TV host Fabio Canino said, “The Vatican, these imbeciles, are burning up years of work of professional doctors in a matter of seconds,” adding, “The irony of this vicious message against homosexuality is that there are more gays per capita inside the Vatican than in most other countries.”

“Everyone will see that it is a serious and systematic effort to engage in a clarifying dialogue,” Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, told the Vatican news agency ZENIT in a January 28 interview.

“We do not engage in crusades nor do we go against institutions,” Cardinal Trujillo said. “Rather, we try to use the instruments of truth that develop between faith and reason, and in this case, we wish to carry out a dialogue with everyone, educators, politicians and lawmakers.”

The lexicon was born of a request by Catholic nongovernmental organizations and some governments that participate in U.N. conferences to clarify “ambiguous terms and concepts” that “impede a real understanding of the speaker’s intentions,” the cardinal explained.

The power of “ambivalent language”

On the issue of rights, one of the contributing authors wrote: “Taken individually these concepts seem fascinating. However, it is not a question of newness but more precisely of a true difference of language, that aims at removing certain human rights from every ethical norm, to relegate them to the realm of privacy by means of ambivalent language.”

In a section on “Homosexuality and Homophobia,” the glossary echoes church teaching by saying that homosexuality stems from an “unresolved psychological conflict” and that people who want to give homosexuals special legal rights “deny a psychological problem [that] makes homosexuality against the social fabric,” according to a report by 365Gay.com.

The lexicon continues, “Every criticism, every reflection on homosexuality is seen almost as blasphemy, compared to a crime: the crime of homophobia.”

Father John Harvey, the founder of Courage, a Vatican-approved apostolate that ministers to people with same-sex attractions and their loved ones in accord with Roman Catholic Church teaching, told C&F Report on April 1 that he thinks the language of the new lexicon may be “a little too strong.”

However, Father Harvey added, those who promote homosexuality and civil unions “lack a basic understanding of natural law. You can argue against these unions simply on the basis that God made us male and female. We’re made in such a way that 98 percent of the human race has a natural attraction toward the opposite sex, so that eventually there will be marriage, and eventually there will be children born from those marriages.”

Unpacking the ‘anti-family ideology’

Louis Giovino, a spokesman for the New York City-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said, “The Vatican is talking about something that is important: the use of language, and how you can use language such as ‘gender’ and ‘same-sex unions,’ which may sound neutral but really have a lot of anti-family ideology packed into them.”

During an address to Indonesian bishops on March 29, Pope John Paul II warned them that “serious concerns about growing threats to family life . . . must not be overlooked.”

The Pope added:

A true “conspiracy against life” (cf. Evangelium Vitae, 17) and the family is appearing in many forms: abortion, sexual permissiveness, pornography, drug abuse and pressures to adopt morally unacceptable methods of population control. Notwithstanding the difficulties involved in countering these tendencies in a non-Christian society, you as Bishops are ‘“the first ones called to be untiring teachers of the Gospel of life” (ibid, 82). At all times, the Church’s prophetic voice must loudly proclaim the need to respect and promote the divine law written on every heart (cf. Romans 2:15).

Writing in the Philippine newspaper Mindanao Times, Father Roy Cimagala welcomed the new Vatican glossary: “I have no doubt that it is going to be a very useful tool and powerful weapon in the struggle to foster what is truly good for man.”

Father Cimagala continued:

A term is manipulated and camouflaged in order to penetrate all sectors through means of communication. An ever greater separation exists between thought, reality, and the word that expresses it, which is the subject of manipulation. In order not to offend the ear, alternative words or phrases are used to replace them, for example: the voluntary interruption of pregnancy for abortion, euthanasia for induced death, the morning-after pill for an abortifacient. We should be wary when we deal with people who combine sophistry and bitchiness to twist the truth about man and things in general.

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Library ‘Protects’ Kids from Jesus But Not Porn (Concerned Women for America, 031215)

By Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel

Facility censors artist’s paintings of Jesus so children won’t be “disturbed.”

Fasten your seat belts—the spin will leave you dizzy.

Mary Morley looked forward to her art show, which was to begin December 1 at the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library. All of the paintings Morley submitted to the library, including a tribute to 9-11 victims, portraits of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, David and Goliath, Moses and the Ten Commandments, and Elijah, were accepted for display, according to the Meriden Record-Journal, December 4. However, library officials nixed five paintings of Jesus.

I’m shocked—I’m over it.

“The library will not accept exhibits which are judged ‘inappropriate’ or ‘offensive’ to any segment of the community,” according to the Meriden, Connecticut’s policy on art exhibits. Deborah Moore, identified as a “Human Rights Advocate and city staff attorney,” claims the policy justifies the library’s exclusion of the paintings of Jesus.

Government is the only entity that can engage in censorship, which means a prior restraint on free speech. Public libraries are government agencies funded by taxpayers. When libraries open a forum for public expression, it violates the First Amendment to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, e.g., David, Moses, Elijah, but not Jesus.

Library officials told Morley that her painting of the crucifixion and one of Christ carrying the cross” might be disturbing to children.” And it might distract them from looking at Internet porn on library computers too.

The “Acceptable Use Requirements” on the library’s Web site have no restrictions on Internet use by children. It’s up to the parents to supervise them. But when it comes to seeing a painting of Jesus, library censors are ever-vigilant to keep kids “from being disturbed.” Apparently, kids seeing images of people having sex with most of the animals on Noah’s Ark isn’t a problem for the sensitivity cops at Meriden.

Too often, library policies are taken jot and tittle from the far-left American Library Association (ALA) and its so-called “Library Bill of Rights.” The ALA is a private trade association and its policies and recommendations have no authoritative force of law for public libraries. The Meriden library acknowledges as much: “Although we often view the patron as the “clientele,” it is important to remember that the patron, as voter and taxpayer, is also the ultimate “boss.” They got that right.

But when their “employers” express an objection to children having access to age inappropriate and sexually explicit material, library elitists are the first to cry censorship. For example, the ALA compiles a list of books that have been “challenged” by patrons in local libraries and uses the list to exploit its “Banned Books Week.” There is a huge difference between challenged and banned. You would think they could look it up in a library dictionary. More importantly, a private citizen or private organization can’t ban anything. If we could, we’d ban “Banned Books Week.”

The Meriden library’s policy on access to materials follows the ALA’s: “The library should offer the same quality of services to all regardless of age, race, sex, nationality, educational background, physical limitations, or any other criteria which may be the source of discrimination.”

When it comes to accessing 1.3 million pages of Internet porn, there’s no age discrimination permitted, but not so when it comes to seeing Jesus. One of the most frequently used objections by libraries to protecting kids from Internet porn is that it will reduce the adult population to reading material suitable for children. But denying adults the right to see Morley’s paintings of Jesus in order to “protect” children is acceptable.

I’m dizzy and disturbed.

Morley tried to convince library officials to at least include either her painting of the Nativity or the Resurrection. They refused. As a result, Morley canceled her show and contacted the Rutherford Institute for legal advice.

I feel better. Kick tush.

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U.N. Meeting on Women Ends in Chaos (Concerned Women for America, 030320)

The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women took place March 3 - 14.

The annual meeting for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) ended with charges of “illegitimacy” and without agreement on one of the two final documents, which addressed violence against women. Disagreements over wording turned into chaos as the moderator ignored the rules of procedure and twice gaveled a final decision. The decisions contradicted each other, and the second one declared there were no objections - even as several countries waved their flags to do just that.

The CSW addressed two themes: women’s access to media and information communications technology, and violence against women. Conference delegates negotiated documents for each theme, with the expected goal of reaching consensus, that is, that all countries on the commission agree with each statement. Each country agrees to implement the details outlined in the documents, and later U.N. documents repeat the wording since it is already “agreed language.”

The discussion on women’s access to media and information communications technology concluded without controversy. Delegates, particularly those from the United States, were alarmed that, while the original draft addressed the importance of this access for women’s education, advancement and political participation, it didn’t address the problem of pornography. However, they successfully added language on the harms of pornography.

In contrast, the document on violence against women ran into conflict over abortion and religion. Two weeks of negotiating winnowed down the offending statements, but it was not enough to produce Agreed Conclusions, a document with which all countries agreed.

Disagreements included:

“Forced pregnancy” - This term conjures up images of soldiers raping to impregnate women in populations targeted for ethnic cleansing. However, abortion advocates also use it to mean any regulation or restriction on abortion. They claim that if a woman cannot end her pregnancy for any reason, then she is forced to be pregnant. In this thinking, pregnancy and motherhood are forms of slavery.

Such a bizarre argument is hard for people to believe, but it has appeared in various law review articles:

* “With regard to abortion, the equality principle would require recognition that forced pregnancy is involuntary servitude and that abortion is essential to women’s full personhood and participation in all spheres of life.” [Rhonda Copelon, “Losing the Negative Right of Privacy: Building Sexual and Reproductive Freedom,” 18 New York University Review of Law and Social Change 15, 40 (1991)]

* “Abortion prohibitions violate the [13th] amendment’s guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates ‘that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.’” [Andrew Koppelman, “Forced Labor: A Thirteenth Amendment Defense of Abortion,” 18 Northwestern University Law Review 484 (1990)]

* “The partial enslavement of a forced pregnancy is only the beginning of the price a woman denied an abortion pays. Bearing a child destroys many women’s lives, because they will no longer be able to work or study or live as they believe they should.” [Prof. Ronald Dworkin, “Unenumerated Rights: Whether and How Roe Should be Overruled,” University of Chicago Law Review (1992)]

* “Legislation that restricts access to abortion is unique in that it is directed at women as a class, has the dramatic effect of forced pregnancy, and historically has significantly oppressed women.” [Julie Kay, “If Men Could Get Pregnant: An Equal Protection Model for Federal Funding of Abortion Under a National Health Care Plan,” 60 Brooklyn Law Review 349, 383 (1994)]

“Forced pregnancy” has been used in various U.N. documents, usually without a definition. After a protracted battle over the phrase, the International Criminal Court statute included this definition:

“Forced pregnancy” means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. This definition shall not in any way be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy. (Article 7 Para 2 f)

Various delegations attempted to have this definition included in the CSW document but met unbending opposition from the European Union (EU). The United States suggested that “forced pregnancy” be qualified “as defined in international and humanitarian law.” Again, the EU refused.

Negative Reference to Religion - Violence against women is excused in many ways, but the CSW document singled out “custom, tradition or religion.” However, some people in modern or westernized countries sanction violent pornography as a form of “freedom of expression,” permit pedophiles to be schoolteachers because of their supposed “right” to a job, and allow sadomasochistic groups to network through the Internet and meet in “family-friendly” hotels under the guise of “personal liberty.” The principles of liberty, freedom of expression and association, valid in and of themselves and essential for a free society, can be, and are regularly, abused in these and other ways.

The statement in the CSW document, known as paragraph O, reads, “Condemn violence against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination.” It starkly projects custom, tradition and religion as negative influences. Delegates who respect religion and its positive benefits asked that the paragraph be balanced. U.S. delegates suggested a phrase calling for refraining from using “culture to avoid obligations to eliminate violence against women.” Several secular countries (EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) rejected this suggestion, which raised the question of whether they were interested only in condemning others - but not willing to face their own faults.

The CSW met on Friday evening March 14 for the final plenary session, intending to adopt two finished documents, offer congratulatory speeches, and then leave. Instead, the final session ended in chaos. Several countries, including the United States, charged that the closing process was illegitimate, and the meeting suspended until a later date.

Here is what happened:

The Chairman formally asked the delegates if they had reached consensus on the document regarding women’s access to media and information communications technology. There were no objections, so he gaveled its acceptance as an Agreed Conclusion, as is the standard practice. He then asked if delegates had reached consensus on the violence against women document.

Several countries stated they did not agree with the paragraph on religion, and urged the conference either to delete it or adopt the U.S. suggestion.

The Chairman responded to this by saying, “It would be a shame if for the first time in history we didn’t come to agreement. Can we adopt the document with reservations?” (Reservations are official statements by individual countries that clarify their understanding of, or exempt them from, specific portions. However, reservations are usually not acknowledged when other, later conferences quote or refer to the problematic phrases.)

But, Iran noted, “unless there is a new definition in the legal procedures,” reservations would mean this is not an Agreed Conclusions document.

The Chairman remarked, “A possibility is to remove O. Is there no agreement? There is no agreement. Therefore, there is no Agreed Conclusion.” Then he gaveled, signifying the end of the proceeding on the violence against women document. According to accepted procedures, that act ends the proceedings.

However, the Facilitator, who moderated discussions on the document, spoke up. “I feel a responsibility as the Facilitator to defend this document. A country would have to state it doesn’t agree.”

The Chairman asked for the Legal Advisor’s guidance, who said, “The CSW can still adopt an Agreed Conclusion by voting either for the document in its entirety or for particular paragraphs. First, countries would agree not to block consensus. After that, countries can make reservations. The only other option is to delete problematic paragraphs. If it is decided not to delete offending paragraphs, then the conclusion [must come] by vote.”

The U.N. prefers to operate almost wholly by consensus. To call for a vote is viewed as a “nuclear weapon”; it indicates disunity, which can reflect poorly on the document.

A Malaysian delegate then raised a question that many delegates were wondering, “The gavel has fallen. Didn’t you make a ruling?”

Voices rumbled throughout the room as everyone agreed. Regardless of where they stood on the controversy, the gavel had fallen.

The Chairman then asked, “Is there objection to consensus?”

Several countries, including the United States, raised their flags in objection. The Iranian delegate, sitting directly in front of the Chair, waved his flag in the air.

Incredibly, the Chairman announced, “The text is adopted. You can add your reservations.”

The room responded in polite applause, as usually happens when a document is adopted. Yet others responded in shock at this second conflicting pronouncement.

Iran stated indignantly, “The Chair gaveled and announced No Agreement. I said I objected to consensus, but you say it is adopted! We should respect each other. According to what rules of procedure is this document being adopted?”

The Chairman answered, “I asked the Legal Officer for clarification on how we should proceed. There were no objections.”

U.S. Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey stated, “I have to object to how this is preceding. To be respected, we must run according to rules. My flag was up when you asked for objections. This is not a legitimate procedure. There are major concerns in this document that affect nations and their laws. This is a great document, but there are a couple of problem areas. In the future, people will say it was Agreed Conclusions. The process is being de-legitimized.”

The Chairman then turned away to consult with staff, causing the delegates in the room to huddle in group discussions. He announced no break, yet the meeting stopped for 30-45 minutes.

When the Chairman finally tried to speak, he had no microphone. The sound technicians and interpreters had gone home. He announced, “We will suspend this session until a later date.”

The controversy at CSW had escalated from objections over paragraphs to a crisis over the legitimacy of the Commission on the Status of Women. Ignoring the fundamental rules of procedure and declaring a document Consensus, or Agreed Conclusion - although several countries objected - raises the most serious questions as to the United Nations’ legitimacy.

These developments at CSW came when the relevancy of the United Nations is under its greatest threat: It refused to uphold its numerous resolutions calling for Iraq to disarm. If U.N. officials cannot follow their own rules, or take seriously the body’s own rulings, then it is merely an agent for empowering the aggressive. This confluence of events could make the United Nations its own worst enemy.

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Conservatives aim to curb power of federal courts (Washington Times, 031118)

A coalition of conservative groups, angered by last week’s ouster of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, vowed yesterday to mobilize “millions” of Americans to pressure Congress to pass laws restricting federal courts’ powers.

Mr. Moore, who was evicted from office on Thursday for not obeying the order of a federal judge to remove a 5,280-pound monument that he had installed two years ago in the rotunda of the state courthouse, is expected to announce his next move today.

“The pseudo-legal gang rape of Justice Roy Moore is an example of creeping Liebermanism,” said Rabbi Yehuda Levin of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Jews for Morality.

He is one of 24 original signers of a “Save the Ten Commandments” petition, which backers aim to present on the steps of the Capitol next September after a “Ten Commandments March” on Washington.

“Just as Senator Joe Lieberman speaks of his religious values while supporting the homosexual agenda and partial-birth abortion,” he said, “so, too, the judicial dictatorship talks about the Constitution and people’s rights while it turns two centuries of America’s history and tradition on its head.”

The petition, which asks Congress to protect the estimated 4,000 replicas of the Ten Commandments posted in city halls and courthouses across the country, is decorated with a cross and a Star of David. The effort is being coordinated by the Houston-based Vision America, a lobbying group representing 3,000 pastors.

Signatories include the Rev. Jerry Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University; Concerned Women for America President Sandy Rios; the Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life; former presidential candidate Gary Bauer of American Values; Bishop Philip Porter of Promise Keepers; Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition; Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson; James Dobson of Focus on the Family; Donna Rice Hughes of Enough is Enough; and Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum.

“The Ten Commandments provide basic principles for a basic civil society,” said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America. “They describe how people ought to interact with each other with honor and integrity, and they state our relationship with God.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council called the federal courts a “jackhammer” that is “chipping away with each and every decision at our religious foundations in this nation.”

“We must demand that Congress ... limit the federal judiciary’s authority on such issues as the national motto ‘In God We Trust,’ the Pledge of Allegiance, marriage and, yes, the Ten Commandments.”

He and other speakers said decisions on these issues should be made by state courts, whose officials, like Chief Justice Moore, are elected, not appointed.

Alan Keyes, a candidate for the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential nomination, said the issue is a “dictatorship of the judiciary.”

He said, “If federal judges can issue orders that ignore the clear message of the Constitution and substitute for it a claim of their own power ... then we don’t have a Constitution. That issue has not been placed before our [elected] representatives. In the course of the next year, it will be.”

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The ACLU vs. the Boy Scouts: The City of San Diego has decided to abandon the Scouts (Concerned Women for America, 040114)

The ACLU needs a new summer camp for its young folks, preferably in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The PC Scouts, as we’ll call them, will head off to Balboa to obtain Rights Badges (as opposed to merit badges) and learn the meaning of the PC Scout Oath: “On my self-esteem, I will do whatever feels good for myself; And to question authority, To help myself at all times, To keep myself physically gratified, Mentally interested, And morally tolerant.”

But the ACLU has a bit of a problem: The coveted camp in Balboa Park is currently being used by the Boy Scouts of America, the archenemy of the ACLU. In order to train up a vast new generation of PC scouts, the ACLU must figure out a way to move the Boy Scouts out of Balboa Park (and a few other places too).

On Thursday, the ACLU came much closer to its goal. The landlord of the Boy Scout camp in Balboa Park, the City of San Diego, switched sides from supporting the Boy Scouts to supporting the ACLU in its quest to destroy the Scouts. As settlement of an ACLU lawsuit against the City of San Diego and the Scouts, the City of San Diego decided to abandon the Scouts in its appeal to remain in Balboa Park.

Last July, U.S. District Judge Napoleon Jones ruled that the Boy Scouts of America is a religious organization. Its presence in Balboa Park was considered a violation of the separation of church and state.

Because the Scouts believe in God, said Judge Jones, there is “overwhelming and uncontradicted evidence” that the Scouts have received preferential treatment in being able to lease Balboa Park.

Under terms of the new settlement, San Diego must request Judge Jones to cancel the Boy Scouts’ lease on Balboa Park. The city will also pay the ACLU nearly $1 million in court costs and attorney fees, which will, of course, help finance the further weakening of the Boy Scouts.

Now that the City of San Diego has given up on the Boy Scouts of America, a nearly 90-year relationship has come to an end.

It began after the 1915 San Diego World’s Fair in Balboa Park when the Santa Fe Railroad donated its Pueblo Indian Village to local Boy Scouts with approval by the San Diego Parks Commission. For 25 years, the Scouts used the Indian Village as a headquarters and recreation site free of charge. During World War II, the military took possession of Balboa Park and the Boy Scouts launched volunteer campaigns to help the war effort from a makeshift headquarters in a local theater.

At the end of the war, the San Diego City Council passed a resolution authorizing the Boy Scouts to take charge of several acres of land in Balboa Park. Through fundraising and volunteer work, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and a 600-seat outdoor amphitheater were constructed. In 1949, the Boy Scouts Desert Pacific Council headquarters building was completed.

Parts of Balboa Park remained undeveloped by 1957, so the city council agreed to transfer additional property to the Boy Scouts for maintenance and operations. A 50-year lease was signed with a rental fee of one dollar per year.

Today, Camp Balboa accommodates up to 300 campers at a time, and it offers a variety of year-round programs. Each year, 12,000 Boy Scouts take part in day camps, weekend camps, and merit badge classes.

But the Boy Scouts organization doesn’t have exclusive access to its own camp. Anyone can use it. Last summer, the two-day San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Festival was held at Balboa Park.

And the Boy Scouts take good care of Balboa Park. The Scouts organization has spent millions of dollars developing and maintaining the public park over the years, without burden to the city and its taxpayers. In the language of free-market think tanks, that’s a classic public-private partnership.

The ACLU cares nothing about saving taxpayers’ money, nor that the Scouts perform millions of dollars and thousands of hours worth of public service for the San Diego community, nor about the fact that the Scouts have been in the park for most of nine decades. The ACLU simply wants to destroy the Boy Scouts of America.

The ACLU is celebrating the capitulation of the City of San Diego. Now the Boy Scouts are left quite alone in a hostile court system to appeal the ruling of Judge Jones. It is likely they’ll be kicked out of their historic camp for good if Americans don’t act fast.

The Boy Scouts need our help. Citizens of San Diego must pack the next city council meeting and express their disapproval of this hideous surrender to the ACLU. Congress must immediately seek the impeachment of Judge Napoleon Jones, who ruled that the Boy Scouts cannot have dealings with government because the Scouts organization is a religious one.

And the Boy Scouts need help with legal bills. Americans from coast to coast must send checks to the Boy Scouts and to the Scouting Legal Defense Fund.

The Boy Scouts have done plenty of good turns for San Diego. Now it is time for San Diego -- and all of America -- to do a good turn for the Boy Scouts.

Hans Zeiger is an 18-year-old Eagle Scout, president of the Scout Honor Coalition, and author of a forthcoming book about the Boy Scouts in the culture wars. Besides writing a regular column, he attends Hillsdale College in Michigan.

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The Stalking House Named CEDAW (Concerned Women for America, 040116)

This week the UN is assessing various nations’ compliance to CEDAW

In ancient times, the men who hunted birds were called “fowlers.” One method they used was to hide behind their horses until they got close enough to capture their prey. That’s where we get our phrase, “stalking horse.” The horse out front is meant to deceive -- behind it, lurks an unseen threat.

Today, there are yet fowlers among us.

This week, at the United Nations, a group of fowlers from 23 nations are meeting to assess various nations’ progress on women’s issues.

They are hiding behind a stalking horse named CEDAW, the Convention to End All Discrimination Against Women. While the treaty has been widely adopted in other nations where some of the provisions address human rights issues, there is nothing in the treaty to benefit women in the United States and the enforcement mechanisms are a threat to national sovereignty.

There are inherent dangers in the treaty’s details. Let me begin with a concise summary statement. In a nutshell, there are two major problems with CEDAW – the content of the treaty and its implementation: CEDAW’s content is contemporary colonialism; it exports –forces down the throats of signee nations – its Neo-Marxist agenda. CEDAW’s implementation is through judicial imperialism; a committee of 23 UN-Appointed women determines whether a nation is in compliance with the treaty – including whether the laws of the country align with the treaty. What the United Nations hasn’t been able to accomplish through democratic processes, they hope to force by judicial fiat.

THE CONTENT OF THE TREATY – ITS SUBSTANCE:

With that brief overview, let’s look first, then, very, very briefly at the content of the treaty. Advocates assert that CEDAW is simply “an international bill of rights” that “sets out basic standards for women’s rights” with the clear implication that anyone opposed to the treaty is a misogynist. Further, they claim, ratification by the United States “would not impose a single new requirement in our laws.”

This claim is preposterous. The treaty is a leftist utopian wish list: comparable worth, paid maternity leave, a national network of child care, free maternity-related health care, gender-blind military service, and quota-determined political parity for women. These are all specific requirements in the treaty itself.

Here’s a way to remember why CEDAW must be opposed in terms of its content alone:

C – Cultural Colonialism

E -- Egregious Enforcement;

D -- Dangerous Demands;

A -- Abortion and the Homosexual Agenda and

W -- Wants of the Elites vs. the Needs of the Needy

First, C: Cultural Colonialism

CEDAW is neo-Marxist contemporary colonialism. At the dawn of the 1900s, British explorer Cecil Rhodes proclaimed: “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain new materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

Substitute a political agenda for Rhodes’ economic one and you find the animating spirit of CEDAW. Today’s feminists find themselves with vast storehouses of surplus political goods and bankrupt ideologies that they want to dump on the Third World. As a bonus, the impoverished, oppressed women of underdeveloped countries represent cheap political capital that the radical feminists are hungry to enlist. Having failed to establish their leftist agenda here in the United States, feminists are looking for “new lands” and “new materials.”

Second, E: Egregious Enforcement

Let me give just one illustration of egregious enforcement. As a result of becoming a signatory State to the CEDAW treaty, Australia has already faced challenges to its laws related to family. For example, Australian national law restricts the use of in vitro fertilization technology to married couples. A single woman appealed to the federal court, cited CEDAW, and claimed gender discrimination. She won.

Third, D: Destructive Demands

There is no doubt that there is great suffering endured around the world, and some of it is a result of discrimination. However, the demands that CEDAW makes for addressing this problem, are destructive.

· They criticized the country of Slovenia because “less than 30 percent of children under 3 years of age ... were in formal day care.”

· They criticized Danish men for not doing their share of the family’s housework.

Fourth, A: Abortion, Sexuality and the Homosexual Agenda

Many proponents of the treaty advocate prostitution as a career option for women, and the oversight committee has repeatedly told signatory nations that restricting abortion or prostitution is a violation of its provisions. Further, the committee gave the following directive to Sri Lanka: Be sure women can abort babies with “congenital abnormalities.” Human rights, then, for all women except those with any handicaps. So much for liberal ideals about equality.

And Lastly, W: Wants of Elites; Not Needs of the Needy

CEDAW’s arrogance in promoting a radical feminist agenda over addressing the legitimate concerns of needy women is appalling. Instead of working to provide for sanitation and medical needs, as well as the freedom that brings human dignity, CEDAW focuses on promoting abortion, children’s autonomy from their parents, homosexuality, wage and salary fixing, federally funded day care and leftist ideas about equality and sexual freedom. When women need clean water, CEDAW gives them comparable?worth policies.

Stealth Stalking Campaign

This CEDAW campaign is only the latest battle in a larger struggle. As the United Nations has advanced into this field of private family concerns, under the guise of human rights, they have consistently used a stalking horse strategy. When we go back and look at their statements over the years, you can see the stratagems of Evolution, Progression, and Encroachment:

In 1948, the UN approved the VERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTSdocument that states the obvious, that marriage is between a man and a woman who form a family with that family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society that is entitled to protection by society and the State. Further, the document affirms that motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.

Fast forward to 1966 and you’ll notice some very significant changes in the next major UN document – the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This document calls for “The widest possible protection and assistance” for the family and it again calls the family the “natural and fundamental group unit of society.” However an innocuous sounding, but important modifying clause was added – “while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children.” In other words, family is only important to society as it relates to the care of children. When we get to CEDAW we begin to better comprehend the progression because NOW the role of the family is even further modified and its significance re-defined – remember the catch phrase “it takes a village to raise a child?”

Then, in 1981, CEDAW defined “maternity” as a social function and stated unequivocably that the “interest of the children is the primordial consideration.” Note the cumulative effect of one change added to another with these subtle shifts in language. First, family is the basic unit of society, then family is important only when children are dependent upon it; then children are the responsibility of the whole village; now there is a movement that children should be autonomous.

The content of CEDAW is bad for women and bad for the country. But there is more – you can begin to see the other dimensions of the problem when you think about the interpretations that the liberal court judges will make in specific cases.

Judicial Imperialism

In a conference workshop, the American Bar Association panel of lawyers casually discussed how CEDAW would be used in court to challenge state and federal laws and policies that they deemed discriminatory.

What the liberals have not been able to market to the American public and achieve through democratically elected representatives, they seek to impose by means of an imperial judicial system.

And with the court-imposed laws, the stakes are high because the problems resulting from their mistakes and misdeeds are much more difficult to remedy. Judicial usurpation of power has gradually increased until now it is breathtaking in its audacity. Robert Bork calls this new regime our “Judicial Oligarchy.” George Will refers to the Justices as “our robed masters.”

The magnitude of the threat posed by erroneous rulings of the Supreme Court was clearly illustrated in both this century and the last. Most historians agree that the Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case was a major factor in propelling us into Civil war in the Nineteenth Century. But the bloody casualties of that horrific war are dwarfed by comparison to the 30 million plus deaths stemming from the Court’s foolish and fraudulent Roe v. Wade ruling in the Twentieth Century.

Yet the blood spilled in the Nineteenth Century abolished slavery. Today, despite the millions of babies that have been aborted -- an American Holocaust whose magnitude exceeds that of Hitler’s by 5 times—the task of eradicating the abomination of abortion still looms before us. Were Lincoln here today, he would doubtless warn us—based on his own bitter travail—of the cost we will pay for this travesty of justice.

If we fail to recognize the strategies of the forces of deception and death, we increase the duration and destruction of their attacks.

They have largely established judicial oligarchy domestically. Now they seek to expand their tyranny internationally through the force of international law. This can be done formally, and informally. Returning to the case of Australia provides an illustration of the informal approach. The goal of Australian feminists is a percentage of women in positions of political influence equal to their percentage in the population. Writing for the Australian Women Lawyers, Hilary Charlesworth described how CEDAW pursues social engineering:

The main method is to try to put pressure on Australia through encouraging the CEDAW Committee to ask Australia questions on this topic when Australia makes its next periodic report under CEDAW. This may sound a rather indirect form of enforcement of the international guarantee, but the usefulness of the technique should not be underestimated.

The CEDAW Assessment Tool

However, enforcement of the CEDAW mandates will not remain informal and “indirect.” The clear intent of activists is to utilize the full force of international law to establish the CEDAW provisions in domestic law. This charge encounters vehement denials from CEDAW supporters, but a recent discovery provides concrete, irrefutable proof:

· The American Bar Association released a lengthy document, The CEDAW Assessment Tool (funded entirely by the United States Agency for International Development), to be used to score countries on their compliance with the treaty and to train judges and other legal professionals in CEDAW’s precedence over national law. The ABA also intends for NGOs to use this in lodging complaints and bringing lawsuits against countries’ laws with which they disagree, regardless of public opinion.

· In the Assessment Tool, the ABA provides guidance on how national sovereignty is affected by the treaty. On page 80, assessors are instructed to ask, as it relates to Article 2 of the Convention: “Is CEDAW directly applied and given effect in courts as part of national law? What training programs exist to educate judges and other legal professionals about CEDAW’s precedence over national law?” Further, they are to query what “national machinery” has been established, and what portion of the national budget allocated, for implementing CEDAW.

The Optional Protocol

And in another move, CEDAW supporters are trying to expand the treaty’s reach even further by promoting the ratification of an “optional protocol:”

· CEDAW’s Optional Protocol allows individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, to file complaints against countries and for the Committee to conduct investigations based on those complaints.

Conclusion: Mandate for Strategic Thinking

CEDAW’s danger is real. Conservative thinkers and analysts have marshaled the evidence against the treaty. The evidence, however, does not always win the day. We must build a winning coalition by convincing moderates that CEDAW is about judicial imperialism. We must explain that the key issue is the further intrusions into our lives by un-elected bureaucrats not accountable to the people through elections – International United Nations bureaucrats. These are elitists with a radical vision incompatible with the values and wishes of the vast majority of citizens—they espouse a vision of society that they could never sell to the general public. Lacking the ability to prevail through elective processes, they have set about to impose their views through the “unholy alliance” of the Courts and the U.N. – who are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to interject their power into the most intimate seams of the fabric of our personal lives.

Sadly, their high-blown rhetoric of human rights and freedom for women is a stalking horse, hiding their radical agenda, which they plan to impose on us all through judicial decree. Let us learn from our Australian friends – they informed the U.N. that they would no longer cooperate with the U.N.’s various reporting systems, including reports to the CEDAW oversight Committee.

Let’s keep a sharp lookout this week while the oversight committee does it work at the UN. Let’s expose that “stalking horse” lest we get caught in the fowler’s snare.

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Dr. Janice Crouse has been tracking the United Nations since 1994 -- both as an Non-Government Organization representative and as an official United States delegate. She has written extensively on United Nations conferences and actions.

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Giving away our freedoms (Washington Times, 041215)

It may be that every American “knows” the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us a Bill of Rights as a guarantor of various liberties, and this belief may be so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that virtually every famous political actor in the country has attested to the framers’ wisdom in their crafting of the great bill, but the plain, historical and undeniable fact of the matter is the framers overwhelmingly rejected any notion of a bill of rights. When the proposal was put forth during the Constitutional Convention, only two men of 55 spoke in favor of the measure, and the state delegations rejected the idea unanimously.

And the bill didn’t fare much better with the men of the First Congress, who approved the amendments only because of crushing pressure from Anti-Federalist factions. Respected constitutional scholar Robert Goldwin notes the House was almost “unanimously opposed” to the amendments; and that the bill’s sponsor was told of these feelings “in terms that were caustic, scornful, and even derisive.”

The framers were convinced that such a bill would actually rob Americans of their rights, not protect them. And they were correct, for as Alexander Hamilton said: “I affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution but would even be dangerous.”

Unnecessary? Dangerous? How, exactly?

When the framers wrote our Constitution, their strategy for safeguarding liberty against government encroachment was really quite simple — they would list, specify and detail the few and defined rights of the federal government. All the uncountable, innumerable scores of rights and powers not found on this small list were off limits to the federal government and were retained by the people. As every good conservative knows, this list the framers referred to is the “enumeration,” and it is contained in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

At this point the framers directed their critics who bemoaned the absence of a bill of rights to the enumeration and noted, quite logically, that since the enumeration contained no provision for the federal government to assail cherished liberties, those rights were already protected. A bill of rights was unnecessary because the rights so loved in our Bill of Rights were already protected, were already completely off limits to federal authority. Nowhere in the enumeration do the people cede to the government the power to regulate the press, thus the federal government has no authority whatsoever to do so, or to suppress free speech, or establish a church, or seize firearms. The logic and simplicity of their reasoning are undeniable.

We now see why the bill was unnecessary. But why, exactly, was it “dangerous?”

Though Madison and Hamilton penned virtually the same words, James Wilson, Pennsylvania delegate to the convention, said it best:

“In a government consisting of enumerated powers, such as is proposed for the United States, a bill of rights would not only be unnecessary, but, in my humble judgment, highly imprudent. In all societies, there are many powers and rights, which cannot be particularly enumerated. A bill of rights annexed to a constitution, is an enumeration of the powers reserved. If we attempt an enumeration, every thing that is not enumerated, is presumed to be given. The consequence is, that an imperfect enumeration would throw all implied power into the scale of the government; and the rights of the people would be rendered incomplete.”

This, of course, is the sad situation in which we now live. A huge majority of Americans and our legislators believe that the federal government may legislate on any topic, at any time, for any reason, period — so long as the legislation does not offend the Bill of Rights. We used to have all the rights contained in the Bill of Rights, plus untold scores of others. Now, as the framers predicted, we have only those rights contained in the Bill of Rights. This is a disaster, not a blessing.

The world the framers gave us (government’s powers limited to a small list) is entirely different from the world given by the Bill of Rights (people’s powers limited to a small list). These two worlds are mutually exclusive. They represent, with mathematical precision, exact and precise diametric opposites. One is the antithesis of the other. The world the framers gave us is not diminished by the Bill of Rights, it is not marginalized; it is utterly and absolutely destroyed. These two visions simply cannot exist side by side. One must die, and indeed, one did.

Others will blame any of a dozen different reasons for our lost rights, but can it really be a coincidence that the only rights we have left are found in the Bill of Rights? Can it?

Rick Lynch, a writer living in Virginia, discusses constitutional issues in his forthcoming book, “They Are Vicious... :How Democracy and the Bill of Rights destroyed the U.S. Constitution.”

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Theology of Human Rights: “Look around” and continue (National Review Online, 050408)

By John F. Cullinan

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. “If you’re looking for his legacy,” reads Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph, “just look around.” By this inscription at his burial place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, posterity was invited to seek Wren’s true memorial in the shape of early-18th-century London, whose inspiring architectural landscape formed Wren’s enduring legacy.

This same invitation — “just look around” — applies with still greater force to any preliminary assessment of the legacy of Pope John Paul II. But it is no easy task to put in proper perspective the whole of John Paul’s teaching and witness over the past quarter century. In fact, his legacy for the Church and for the world is so large, complex, and near to us in time that it’s hard to even discern its broad outlines, much less the proper relation of its components to the larger whole. What’s more, certain aspects are visible only through the eyes of faith. But one way to put his overall legacy in some perspective is through the lens of his abiding commitment to religious freedom, which John Paul understood as the cornerstone of human rights generally, and the key to the relationship between freedom and truth in particular.

In fact, the political impact of John Paul’s papacy results largely from the renewed theological basis of modern Catholic teaching on religious freedom as embodied by John Paul’s personal witness. Until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), church teaching favored the status quo, if not ancien regime throne-and-altar arrangements (domination where possible, toleration where necessary). Only a radically new understanding of religious freedom — shaped in part by the 45-year-old archbishop of Krakow in 1965 and applied vigorously by the 58-year-old Bishop of Rome beginning in 1978 — can explain the paradox of the Roman Catholic Church’s becoming the principal institutional defender of human rights around the world.

THE CHURCH TAKES ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (known by its Latin title Dignitatis Humanae or DH) broke new ground by shifting the whole basis of church teaching from particular church-state arrangements to humans as a free and responsible subjects. To simplify, prior teaching held that “error has no rights,” meaning that the ideal state would suppress “error” — public expression (but not private worship) of other Christian denominations and non-Christian faiths — and impose Catholic moral norms through the civil law. But the Council fathers recognized that while “error” (however defined) may have no rights, persons do: “The right to religious freedom is based on the very dignity of the human person known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.”

Basing the teaching on human dignity, rather than on some ideal constitutional order, was the key step toward regaining the proper theological and practical freedom of the church (libertas ecclesiae), especially from outmoded and indefensible throne-and-altar arrangements (like Franco’s Spain or Salazar’s Portugal). According to DH, “This right of the human person to religious freedom must be given such recognition in the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right,” but its concrete expression depends on local cultural, historical, and political circumstances.

Basing the teaching on human dignity also made it compatible in practice with the secular understanding of human rights first set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The UDHR holds that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” It is precisely this shared recognition of human dignity as the basis for all human rights that long enabled practical collaboration between believers and non-believers, despite irreconcilable differences regarding the ultimate source of human dignity. And it has also fostered broad agreement on the elements of religious freedom, notably in Article 18 of the binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).

FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE AND FREEDOM OF RELIGION

What exactly are the essential elements of religious freedom? In both Catholic theology and in international law, religious freedom means that no one should be (a) restrained from acting in accordance with his religious beliefs or (b) coerced into acting contrary to his religious beliefs. These freedoms for and freedoms against — rights and immunities in legal parlance — are subject only to certain narrow and well-defined public-order limitations (for the sake of public peace, morality, and justice). What’s more, these same freedoms belong not only to individual persons but also to religious groups, and include, among other rights, maintenance of institutional integrity and participation in public life. This institutional dimension of religious freedom proved critical in opening up social space — and offering essential political protection — for reformers in closed societies as diverse as Poland and the Philippines or East Germany and East Timor.

John Paul II literally seized the moment to promote religious freedom, publicly raising the plight of the persecuted church four times in the first three days of his papacy. Two months later, he marked the thirtieth anniversary of the UDHR by urging that “freedom of religion for everyone and for all people must be respected by everyone everywhere.” By emphasizing (as DH does) that this right belongs to all believers and all faiths, John Paul elevated the discussion from the realm of special pleading for the Roman Catholic Church and its institutional interests.

Right from the start John Paul also made clear that freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are the prerequisites for the exercise of all other basic human rights. In theory and practice, all these rights, such as free expression and free association, depend on the prior guarantee of a free conscience. Certainly the historical reality is that where religious freedom is denied, so too are other basic human rights. And the indivisible character of all human rights was part of the message John Paul brought to practically every corner of the world. Small wonder that dictators found his message unwelcome when, as Samuel Huntington puts it, “John Paul seemed to have a way of showing up in full pontifical majesty at critical points in democratization processes” where authoritarian regimes hung in the balance.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

John Paul’s many successes in Huntington’s “third wave” of democratization are too familiar to recount. What unfinished business in human rights does he leave for his successor?

There are three principal challenges. First, China and much of the Muslim world still deny religious freedom and other basic human rights.

China’s totalitarian leadership denies all civil and political rights for fear of following in the U.S.S.R.’s footsteps. According to this view, any lessening of state control would lead inexorably to chaos and loss of the Communist political monopoly. While international human-rights law requires as much freedom as possible, and as little restriction as necessary, the Chinese authorities expressly forbid whatever isn’t explicitly permitted. The overall situation of religious believers is dire; and China remains the only state that presumes to appoint Catholic bishops and otherwise control the internal life of the church.

The Muslim world, on the other hand, lacks a theology of religious pluralism that recognizes the equal dignity of every human person. Its historical experience is one of Muslim domination and non-Muslim dhimmitude (legally enforced inferiority in every sphere of life). Despite some welcome political changes now taking place in the Middle East, it remains unclear whether Islam has the theological resources to develop — and the institutional capacity to apply — an authentically new understanding of its own tradition.

There is some indication that the Vatican is now rethinking its inter-religious dialogue with Muslim religious leaders, widely reckoned a dismal failure. Its inter-religious dialogue and state-to-state diplomacy have long been hampered by the effective status of Christian minorities as hostages in the Arab world, but lack of reciprocity is leading to second thoughts. Recently the Vatican asked U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to raise with the Saudis the plight of some two million Christian guest workers denied any pastoral care and forbidden any outward expression of their faith. This would have been unthinkable as recently as when the Italian government sought and received the Vatican’s tacit permission for the Saudis to erect a gargantuan mosque in Rome. Then as now, of course, there are no churches in Saudi Arabia, nor any publicly declared priests or ministers.

Second, there is the challenge posed by the mounting intellectual and moral confusion of the secular human-rights establishment, as evidenced by the collapse of support for human rights as indivisible, universal, and grounded in human dignity.

The framers of the UDHR settled on human dignity as the cornerstone of human rights as a practical compromise dictated by intellectual, religious, and political pluralism. It was possible to agree that humans possess inherent dignity without specifying the ultimate sources. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher who helped prepare the UDHR, famously remarked: “Yes, we agree about the rights, but only on condition no one asks us why.”

For Christians, the reason why is that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the blood of Christ. For many others, however, formerly self-evident truths based on practical reason are no longer evident or true. That is why human rights are no longer a moral imperative but merely a policy preference or intellectual fashion choice. At least two broad consequences follow.

One is that human rights have been increasingly instrumentalized — and trivialized — as a vehicle for attacking American interests and values, especially in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. That is increasingly the approach taken by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and various U.N. bodies. Such selective indignation and lack of proportion diminish respect for human rights generally. Another consequence is the ongoing effort to detach religious freedom from other basic human rights on the ground that it is dispensable or even dangerous. This was made unmistakably clear when a Catholic/Evangelical/Jewish coalition struggled to secure passage of the International Religious Freedom of 1998, while the secular human-rights establishment — and several mainline Protestant churches — remained indifferent or hostile. Today international religious freedom still remains the neglected redheaded stepchild of the human-rights movement.

Third, there is the challenge of the naked public square, where religious or moral arguments are increasingly ruled out of bounds as an effective establishment of “theocracy.” That is likely to be one of the enduring lessons of the Schiavo case. And it’s one the Vatican learned the hard way through its unsuccessful efforts to include a reference to Christianity in the potted history of Europe that prefaces the European Union’s new constitution. This latter episode also appears to have provoked some second thoughts about the European project in the Vatican, where uncritical support long prevailed.

UNRESOLVED TENSIONS

But there’s more at stake in the larger unresolved tensions in John Paul’s teaching on freedom and democratic institutions. Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian philosopher who worked closely with John Paul, correctly identifies this “general principle” as underlying the pope’s whole teaching: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and the free gift of oneself in love.”

How does one reconcile authentic freedom with mere license? Can the two co-exist without one suppressing the other? Is broad — though not universal — consensus possible on the outlines of an objective moral order based on some understanding of natural law? Or is objective truth simply outmoded and irrelevant?

Such are a few of the human-rights challenges John Paul’s successor faces at this moment in the life of the church.

— John F. Cullinan formerly served as a senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.S. Catholic bishops, focusing on human rights, religious freedom, and international law.

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