SexPolitics 5 (3215)

IV
Globalizing Sex—and Sexual Power
“Why is the West so obsessed with sex?”

—Nigerian delegate to a UN conference1
“Military missions and foreign interventions
are [now] defined as a form of social work.”
—Henry Kissinger2
SEXUAL POLITICS is now worldwide, and radical sexual ideology is

ascendant in the politics of virtually every country on earth. Yet it is
entirely a Western and largely an Anglo-American export. Though
Americans, Britons, and other English speakers like to see themselves as
set apart, these countries are the epicenters of the new sexual politics.
For decades, Britain and especially the United States have been export-
ing an aggressive sexual radicalism. “In America,” Czechoslovak presi-
dent Thomas Masaryk observed in 1925, “abortion has become a
business, and . . . the number of divorces is legion.”3
Here too it is more than a matter of culture. As institutionalized in
the foreign policies of the United States and other Western nations and
in organizations like the United Nations (UN) and European Union
(EU), sexual politics is in many ways in the vanguard of political global-
ization. Sexual liberation now rationalizes major foreign policy adven-
tures, including acts of aggressive war. It has dominated campaigns for
“human rights” with authoritarian measures that actually violate
human rights as generally conceived.4 The UN and EU are feminist
1. Quoted in Sharon Slater, Stand for the Family (Gilbert, AZ: Inglestone, 2009), 8.
2. “Power Shifts,” Survival, vol. 52, no. 6 (2010), 206. See Michael Mandelbaum,
“Foreign Policy as Social Work,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 75 (January–February 1996).
3. Thomas Masaryk, The Making of a State (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), 216.
4. Stephen Baskerville, “Sex and the Problem of Human Rights,” The Independent
Review, vol. 16, no. 3 (Winter 2012).
235
236 The New Politics of Sex
strongholds whose policies undermine families and other traditional

values, foment instability and poverty, and create myriad social prob-
lems for their operatives to solve. Here too, homosexualists are follow-
ing suit. These organizations proliferate the programs described
throughout this book and impose them on poor countries, creating
extensive transnational sexual bureaucracies. Much like Western welfare
states, transnational “aid” programs generate the very poverty and
social turmoil they claim to be alleviating.
Sex and the International Regime

US Foreign Policy
Government agencies in democratic countries are supposed to remain
ideologically neutral and not advocate religious, political, or other doc-
trines as if they are official policy. All our controversies over “separation
of church and state” proceed, ostensibly, from this principle that career
officials are functionaries, not advocates, who implement policies in the
name of all the people but who may not in the process lobby for any
particular policy on behalf of a special interest.
This principle is less rigorously enforced abroad than at home. In
principle, we do not allow government propaganda machinery to dis-
seminate political or other ideas, however apparently unexceptionable,
within our own borders, whereas they may do so overseas.
This loophole has been exploited by feminists and homosexualists,
who alone are exempt from the principle. Throughout the foreign (and
increasingly domestic) policy apparatus of the United States and other
Western governments, feminist ideology (or “gender perspective”) is
treated as official government policy, with no dissenting opinions even
acknowledged, let alone aired, and no objections permitted. Homosex-
ualist ideology has recently achieved similar status.5 US embassies host
“gay pride” events, ambassadors march in “gay pride” parades and regu-
larly take positions on internal controversies within their host countries
when they involve sexuality, and the US government actively interferes
in the internal politics of other countries by funding feminist and
homosexualist pressure groups.6
5. Presidential Memorandum—International Initiatives to Advance the Human

Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons, White House press release, 6
December 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/06/presidential-me
morandum-international-initiatives-advance-human-rights-l.
6. White House Fact Sheet, “Promoting and Protecting the Human Rights of LGBT
Persons,” 29 June 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/29/fact-sh
eet-promoting-and-protecting-human-rights-lgbt-persons.
Globalizing Sex—and Sexual Power 237
Strangely, the Obama administration seemed to make “LGBT” issues

the very cornerstone of its foreign policy. “Throughout the Obama
Administration, the promotion and protection of the human rights of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons has been a spe-
cific focus of our engagement around the world,” the administration
itself notes. While often criticized for incoherence and reticence in for-
eign affairs, on one issue it has demonstrated resolution and consis-
tency. “The Obama Administration defends the rights of LGBT people
as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a foreign pol-
icy priority,” states then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.7 While
invoking “human rights,” the Administration has been virtually silent at
the mass slaughter of religious groups by the Islamic State and other
extremist movements that seriously threaten the broader international
order. “Internationally, this Administration has bent over backwards to
promote LGBT rights globally but stays silent as Christian minorities
abroad suffer persecution and in the Middle East genocide,” a former
senior State Department official has said.8
Likewise, “USAID has a special interest in the advancement of women
worldwide and is working to improve women’s equality and empower-
ment,” says the website of the US Agency for International Develop-
ment. “Not only because it is just, but because it is necessary for
successful development.” As we will see, this reflects a conception of
“human rights” that “empowers” some humans by disempowering oth-
ers. This statement could have been written by any number of feminist
pressure groups that enunciate this claim (with no proof). This opinion
proceeds from an ideology with which not all Americans agree, and
their government is not authorized to be representing the opinions of
such special interests. Most impoverished countries likewise do not
share these ideological stances on sexual morality, but money from
wealthy democracies is used to twist their arms into accepting radical
agendas in their domestic politics, a clear interference in their internal
affairs. “USAID supported development of legislation against domestic
violence in Albania; landmark legislation to address sexual harassment
in Benin; draft legislation on trafficking in persons in Mozambique; and
proposed amendments to the existing family code in Madagascar.”9
Similarly, “the State Department’s Global Equality Fund . . . has allo-
7. Ibid.
8. Quoted in Wendy Wright, “Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy: Chaos and LGBT,” 5
May 2016, website of Center for Family and Human Rights, https://c-fam.org/friday_
fax/obamas-foreign-policy-legacy-chaos-lgbt/.
9. USAID website: http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/cross-cutting_programs/wid/.
cated more than $30 million to frontline advocates in 80 countries. In

2015, the Global Equality Fund provided nearly $11 million . . . to sup-
port civil society organizations and activists around the globe.”10 In
other words, US agencies operate as feminist and homosexualist pres-
sure groups in the internal politics of other nations, an activity they may
not legally pursue within the US (though other federal agencies are
reimporting similar practices).
US foreign policy thus operates a global patronage machine, using
financial leverage to control the internal politics of recipient states by
creating client pressure groups and taking sides in their internal politics
to “empower” one part of their population over others.11 This is remi-
niscent of Soviet “salami tactics” that engineered Communist coups in
post-war Eastern Europe.
American sexual imperialism is also seen in the International Vio-
lence Against Women Act, perennially pending in the US Congress. I-
VAWA represents a campaign to export American feminism to poor
countries, keeping them dependent on international welfare from the
US and UN and therefore very likely in a state of permanent underde-
velopment, and to make feminism the official ideology of US foreign
policy.
As we saw earlier and will see further, the entire concept of “domestic
violence” is an artificial political category created specifically to circum-
vent due process protections of standard criminal assault statutes and
punish people who cannot be convicted in standard trials on the basis
of evidence.12 Like its domestic counterpart, I-VAWA contains provi-
sions to shield and encourage accusers but none to protect the accused.
It funds legal services for women but not men and programs on sexual
abuse of girls but not boys.
The measure has little to do with “violence.” It declares feminism
(“gender analysis”) to be the official US ideology, and officials must
“actively promote and advance the full integration of gender analysis
into the programs, structures, processes, and capacities of all bureaus
and offices of the Department of State and in the international pro-
grams of other Federal agencies.” The bill funds propaganda to indoc-
trinate foreign populations in feminist ideology, empowering US
diplomats to “change social norms and attitudes” in other countries.
10. White House Fact Sheet.

11. This memo has been removed from the USAID internet site, but it is quoted in
“Women in Development,” 11 June 2009 (accessed November 5, 2016), here: http://am
ksbd.blogspot.com/.
12. See above, chapter III, under “Domestic Violence.”
Here too, the US government would finance pressure groups in other

sovereign countries, taking sides in their internal politics and funding
(“foreign aid”) feminist groups or “nongovernmental organizations led
by women.” Of course such organizations would no longer be “nongov-
ernmental” at all; they would be paid US agents operating in other
countries’ domestic affairs.
I-VAWA also includes provisions to politicize the US military and
international peacekeeping forces to make them instruments for “the
empowerment of women.”
I-VAWA would create an Office of Global Women’s Issues headed by
an Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, with sweeping
powers beyond any other “ambassador”: to direct the “activities, poli-
cies, programs, and funding” to advance women and girls in both the
State Department and the “international programs of all other federal
agencies.” She will also ensure that feminism is central to US foreign
policy and “coordinate efforts . . . regarding gender integration and
advancing the status of women and girls in United States foreign pol-
icy.” She will “represent the United States in diplomatic and multilat-
eral fora on matters relevant to the status of women and girls.” This
official is required to coordinate her duties with feminists (“organiza-
tions with demonstrated experience in . . . promoting gender equality
internationally”) but not others. A similar czarina (Senior Coordina-
tor for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment) is also created
within USAID.13
The European Union

The European Union, like the United Nations, has become a bureau-
cracy in search of a purpose. As its original mission is increasingly chal-
lenged and untenable, it seeks a renewed mission in sexual matters. As
one observes notes, “The EU has exhibited a lopsided focus on egalitar-
ian and anti-discriminatory policies in the areas of human life and sex-
uality.”14
The EU is mandated to address only issues within its “competence.” It
was founded on the principle of “subsidiarity,” meaning that governing
authority rests at the most local level of competence whenever possible,
ppp
13. See “Analysis of the 2013 International Violence Against Women Act,” website of
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, http://www.saveservices.org/dvlp/policy-brief-
ings/ivawa-2013-analysis/, 5 December 2013.
14. Maciej Golubiewski, Europe’s Social Agenda (New York: Catholic Family and Hu-
man Rights Institute, 2008, http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.278/pub_detail.asp), 36.
and that the default authority remains with member governments. Yet
subsidiarity is often ill-defined and “practically ineffectual on social pol-
icy matters.”15
The European Union has no competence to legislate family policy,
which falls within the authority of member countries. Yet like all gov-
ernments and quasi-governments, it is constantly pushing back the
boundaries of its own jurisdiction and is now moving into family and
private life. A major driver of this “competence creep” is politicized sex-
uality. “Gender policy has a dominant role in the moral regulation of
Europe,” Maciej Golubiewski writes, “and gender equality principles are
increasingly embedded in its founding documents.”16
The EU usually rationalizes its forays into family and sexual issues as
promoting “human rights,” specifically efforts to eradicate “discrimina-
tion” against women and homosexuals17 and to promote the expansive
field of “children’s rights.”18 In 2010, the EU funded a conference in
Dublin on adoption, clearly outside its competence, because the aim
was to promote same-sex adoption. Ironically, the conference was billed
as an advance in children’s rights. An earlier conference to promote
same-sex marriage was rationalized in terms of “non-discrimination.”
“The funding of this conference highlights an issue that caused many
Irish voters to reject the Lisbon Treaty—the problem of ‘competence
creep’ in the European Union,” says Irish Senator Ronan Mullen. “This
happens when European institutions . . . extend their policy and deci-
sion-making into areas that are supposed to be matters for individual
member states.”19 Here yet again, sexual radicalism is the cutting edge
of expanding government power.
The EU is far from ideologically neutral, as true governments in free
societies are required to be, but actively promotes and funds organiza-
tions that advance feminist and homosexualist ideology. The Network
for European Women’s Rights (NEWR) is an EU-funded project advo-
cating return to Soviet abortion laws in East-Central Europe. “The
opening of the EU to the East has brought in strong, religion-based
pppp
15. Ibid., 52.

16. Ibid., 36.
17. See the website of the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency: http://
fra.europa.eu/en.
18. EU Guidelines for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of the Child,
Council of the European Union website: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms
Upload/16031.07.pdf (n.d., accessed 16 October 2010).
19. Iona Institute website: http://www.ionainstitute.ie/index.php?id=994 (10 August
2010).
views on abortion,” NEWR laments, “and the relatively liberal abortion

legislation from the Soviet era is gradually being overturned.”20
The EU experience demonstrates once again how the sexual agenda
threatens freedom and democracy. Already strongly criticized for its
“democratic deficit”—the practice of governing by anonymous and
unelected civil servants and diplomats rather than elected and account-
able representatives—the EU has pursued a largely hidden social agenda
that pushes this realm of unaccountable government to new depths. A
study of the EU’s social agenda warns about “the profoundness of the
EU’s ‘democratic deficit’” in the area of social policy especially:
Its consultative operation is selective in the choice of privileged part-
ners, biased in its ideological coloring, and largely removed from the
democratic oversight process by EU member states. Indeed, one of the
most dangerous trends in EU governance is the technocratic view that
representation of social views on the EU level is done better by uncriti-
cally involving “civil society organizations” [i.e., favored pressure
groups], rather than democratically elected bodies of the member
states.
This privileged status of “non-governmental organizations” is indeed
deceptive. As indicated, they now call themselves “civil society,” suggest-
ing a Tocquevillian role akin to churches, charities, civic groups, unions,
and other truly private organizations. Yet unlike true civil society insti-
tutions, these groups are funded by the EU itself, raising the question of
precisely how “non-governmental” they really are. “These self-styled
representatives of civil society are the main recipient of EU funds often
with their own budget lines, such as the European Youth Forum, itself a
member of the Social Platform, European Women’s Forum, and the
International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA],” writes Golu-
biewski. ILGA receives 70% of its funding from EU taxes.21
Again, democratic governments are supposed to be ideologically
neutral, listening to various interests as they implement policy but not
funding and favoring some ideological interests to tell themselves what
to implement. “That they enjoy EU funding . . . in no way legitimizes
their rise and their claim to represent truly European interests.”22
Indeed, the great irony is that these semi-governmental entities actively
undermine their competitors, precisely the institutions that truly do
constitute autonomous, non-governmental “civil society” such as fami-
20. Golubiewski, Europe’s Social Agenda, 45.

21. Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name
of Freedom (Kettering, OH: Lifesite, 2015), 83.
22. Ibid., 48.
lies, churches, and local community groups—all reminiscent of their

predecessors in the Soviet bloc, which established sham institutions
specifically to prevent the formation of real ones. “Through a biased
political sponsorship and funding of civil society groups mostly inimi-
cal to traditional values, the European Commission has sponsored com-
munity programs that directly question the reserved competence and
rights of the intermediary institutions of family, education, and the
church,” Golubiewski concludes. “Unaccountable ‘expert networks’
attached to the EC and EU agencies act with no democratic surveillance
and their ‘independent’ reports have been used by the EC to bully coun-
tries such as Slovakia into compliance with the ‘expert’ interpretation of
EU law.”23
By posing as a supranational government over half of Europe, while
not actually being a real government that answers to the people it claims
to govern, the EU blurs the distinction between a government that is
supposed to represent all the people within its territory, and an ideolog-
ical pressure group that represents a limited private interest, which it
promotes at the expense of others. And again, this is especially pro-
nounced with social and sexual issues.
As we will see, the UN is similar on a less intensive but much grander
scale. Importantly, neither the UN nor the EU contains a clear separa-
tion of policy making from policy implementation, a bedrock principle
of free societies and the main protection against the politicization,
intimidation, and corruption of civil servants. Policymaking is an
inherently political process subject to partisan competition, whereas its
implementation must, in free societies, be conducted by nonpolitical
functionaries. (Legislators are chosen based on their party affiliation;
policemen should not be.) In both the EU and UN however, functionar-
ies are highly politicized. They are free to advocate for specific programs
and then implement and administer the very program for which they
advocated, increasing their own power by marginalizing or punishing
any who question it. In other words, they can use their positions as the
implementers of policy to lobby for more of the policies they are imple-
menting, a fundamental conflict of interest.
The boldest measure yet may be the proposed Directive on Equal
Treatment, pending since 2008 behind closed doors at the EU’s Council
of Ministers. This is a blanket order prohibiting “discrimination” virtu-
ally by anyone against anyone, including private individuals. It adopts
precisely the methods of criminalization explored in the previous chap-
ter. Nothing requires that accusers prove their accusations against their
23. Ibid., 49–50.

alleged discriminators; instead, the burden falls on the accused—who

may be private citizens minding their own business—to prove their
innocence. But it is formulated so that an accusation in itself constitutes
a finding of guilt. It also offers rich financial rewards to accusers and
inflicts crushing financial penalties on the accused.
Though the Directive includes a number of grounds for alleged vic-
timization, sexual ideology is again the driving force. Anyone claiming
discrimination based on “sexual orientation” can sue and collect from
the alleged discriminator. “Discrimination” includes simply expressing
religious or political beliefs.
Further expanding methods pioneered with “domestic violence” and
“sexual harassment,” victim status is entirely a subjective determination.
An accuser automatically becomes a “victim” merely by being “of-
fended” by someone else’s beliefs, essentially by accusing. Discrimina-
tion is defined as being treated by someone “less favorably” than some-
one else, and the determination of whether the accuser has been treated
less favorably is left to the accuser. Sophia Kuby of European Dignity
Watch explains:
Discrimination is defined as treating a person “less favourably” com-
pared to another, because he or she belongs to one or more of the
mentioned groups: disability, age, religion or belief, sexual orientation.
Throughout the . . . directive, “less favorable treatment” refers to a
subjective perception of offense or the violation of one’s dignity. There
are no objective criteria given in order to define which behavior is
deemed to be discriminatory and which is not. Anybody can claim to
having been treated in a “less favorable” or “offensive” way, in large
part subjective states, which could be automatically conceded as being
true.24
Because the legal transgression is offending someone, all accusations are
automatically true. It is impossible to defend against an accusation of
offending someone; one is guilty by virtue of being accused.
Moreover, an even more vague standard than this “direct discrimina-
tion” is possible: “Indirect discrimination shall be taken to occur where
a rule or a practice which seems neutral, has a disadvantageous impact
upon a person or group of persons having a specific characteristic. The
intention to discriminate is explicitly not relevant.”25
24. Sophia Kuby, “‘Principle of Equality’ to Overrule Fundamental Freedoms,” Euro-

pean Dignity Watch (EDW) website, 16 October 2010: http://www.europeandignitywat
ch.org/reports/detail/article/principle-of-equality-to-overrule-fundamental-freedoms.
html.
25. Ibid.
As with all the new gender crimes (but perhaps especially drawing
from the model of divorce proceedings), emotions rather than objective
facts constitute the “evidence” against the accused. “The Directive, in
assuming the equality of all sorts of couples, arbitrarily refers to ‘emo-
tion’ as the sole criterion for equality,” writes Kuby. “Such a distorted
concept of ‘equality’ leads to injustice, not to justice.”26
The “harassment” provision is taken directly from the novelty of sex-
ual harassment, which it broadens to make even more vague and sub-
jective. Harassment is defined as anything having “the purpose or effect
of violating the dignity of a person and of creating an intimidating, hos-
tile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment.” This allows an
individual to accuse another individual merely for expressing some-
thing the individual perceives as creating an “offensive environment.”
According to Christian Concern:
“Harassment,” as vaguely defined in the Directive . . . allows an indi-
vidual to accuse someone of harassment merely for expressing some-
thing the individual allegedly perceives as offensive. Thus, even if a
Christian or Christian organisation possesses no intent to offend or
harass, once someone decides to perceive the Christian’s expression as
offensive, that person can commence legal action. Once legal action
commences against the Christian (or a Christian organisation), the
burden of proof shifts to the Christian to prove that the accuser was
not “harassed.”27
The Directive is thus highly subjective and vague in what it prohibits,
making it impossible to know if one has transgressed. “These concepts,
which at times refer even to completely subjective sentiments, percep-
tions, and states of mind, lead to dangerous legal uncertainties,” writes
Kuby. “The question of whether something constitutes harassment
therefore largely depends on the subjective perception of the ‘victim,’
not on any verifiable and objective criteria.” Here too, the expansive lan-
guage expands the population of the culpable: “The Directive is thus
drafted in a way that everybody could be found guilty of ‘discrimina-
tion’ at any time. But it must be expected that it will not be applied uni-
formly, but in a selective manner. The creation of general legal
uncertainty that puts everybody under threat of legal persecution.”28
26. Ibid.
27. Information and Action Pack on the European Union “Equal Treatment” Directive
(London: Christian Concern, 2009), 4 (http://www.ccfon.org/docs/CCFON_&_CLC_In
formation_&_Action_Pack_on_the_EU_Equal_Treatment_Directive_FINAL.pdf).
28. S. Kuby, “Principle of Equality.”
The vagary turns the law into a weapon for whoever is able or willing
to be the first to take advantage of it. According to Christian Concern,
“The ambiguous language of the harassment provision fails to provide
the public with adequate notice of the kind of conduct that is prohibited
by the law.”29 If citizens cannot determine what is prohibited, not only
can they not know if they have transgressed; they also cannot know if
anyone else has either. Everyone is guilty from the moment they are
accused. The distinction between justice and injustice is erased from the
law, leaving it simply a weapon in the power competition, a bludgeon
with no moral or ethical grounding available to whoever has better
access to the legal machinery for use against whomever they choose.
As we have seen with similar gender offenses, the presumption of
innocence is inverted and the burden of proof placed on the accused to
prove his innocence, not on the accuser to prove his guilt: “It shall be for
the respondent [the accused] to prove that there has been no breach of
the prohibition of discrimination.” Christian Concern comments: “The
burden of proof shifts to the accused, who must then prove a negative
(…that the alleged expression did not create an offensive environment
as perceived by his or her accuser).”30 This is patently impossible and,
again, amounts to guilt by accusation. The accuser determines the guilt
of the accused simply by his or her state of mind. “Under the Directive,
‘discrimination’ occurs even when an accused individual’s expression is
not accompanied by any intent to harass or offend . . . a violation none-
theless exists if the accuser perceives the requisite offense.”31 Kuby
writes similarly:
whoever is accused of ‘discrimination’ must prove his innocence,
whereas any person claiming to have been a victim of discrimination is
automatically presumed to be one. The reversal of proof puts the
defendant into a trap from which there is no escape: it is impossible for
him to disprove that something has had the effect of ‘intimidating’ or
‘offending’ the victim (because that solely depends on the victim’s sub-
jective perception). At the same time, it is also hardly possible for the
defendant to disprove the Directive’s legal assumption that he acted
the way he did solely out of a prejudice against the plaintiff ’s religion,
belief, disability or sexual orientation.32
The law becomes a shakedown, because the accuser may then de-
mand to be paid virtually any sum from the accused. Being offended
29. Information and Action Pack, 5.

30. Ibid., 6.
31. Ibid.
32. S. Kuby, “Principle of Equality.”
brings lucrative payoffs, and being offensive means ruin. Since failure or
inability to pay can mean incarceration, criminalization is the next step
in this ostensibly “civil” process. With striking resemblance to the
Anglo-American divorce system on whose principles it is clearly (and
perhaps consciously) modeled, the law becomes an extortion racket, in
which hurt feelings can be avenged with plunder and prison.
This obviously creates yet more financial incentives to bring as many
accusations as possible, creating another windfall for lawyers, who can
then pressure courts to reward accusers with generous payoffs. One
amendment proposes paying the legal fees of accusers while leaving the
accused to pay for their own defense.
The Directive also creates new armies of civil servants who can justify
and finance their own existence by generating complaints and lawsuits
(“promotion of equal treatment”). Governments must create new func-
tionaries to provide “independent assistance to [alleged?] victims of dis-
crimination in pursuing their complaints.” As Kuby observes, these
officials will mount legal cases in the names of the alleged victims and
assume (and then recoup) the legal costs. No officials are created to
assist or protect the accused. Private groups may even launch legal com-
plaints in the name of alleged victims and share in the spoil. “Any NGO,
who has the necessary financial power, could henceforth accuse alleged
offenders and appear in court as complainant although the presumed
discriminatory behavior is not directly related to them,” says Kuby. Such
groups may then figure their own “costs” into the inevitable award, cre-
ating a risk-free invitation to loot anyone whose views “offend.” “This
possibility of litigating at no cost and no risk will, in conjunction with
the reversal of the burden of proof, further encourage frivolous [but
lucrative] litigation.”33 This is not equality; it is thievery.
The Directive also penalizes discrimination based on “age,” without
specifying what this means. Because it can include children, it can prob-
ably be used against parents. Though children are not bound by con-
tracts, they could potentially sue their parents for “discrimination.”
The Directive contains no exemption for freedom of speech, religion,
or conscience, and “no balancing mechanisms to arbitrate between
competing sets of rights.”34 The measure purports to protect “religious
belief,” but with breathtaking irony this is inverted to mean not the free-
dom to express one’s beliefs but the power to sue others for expressing
their beliefs. As Kuby explains, “explanation of one’s religious tenets to a
33. Ibid. See also Paul Coleman and Roger Kiska, “The Proposed EU ‘Equal Treat-
ment’ Directive,” International Journal for Religious Freedom, vol. 5, issue 1 (2012).
person of another faith could also be interpreted as harassment.” Reli-

gious faith is not a belief to be exercised, expressed, and defended from
state interference but a badge of victim status and a claim to wield gov-
ernment coercion to silence other religions. Ironically, this intertwines
religion and government rather than separating them.
Notable here is the convergence of the radical sexual with the radical
Islamist agenda: both are protected against being “offended” by Chris-
tians. Despite their theoretical antithesis, both sexual radicals and reli-
gious radicals aim to use government power to stop the mouths of their
critics. They share a common antipathy to Christianity and a fear of free
expression.35
As so often with radical ideology, this Directive creates precisely the
problem it claims to combat. A measure advertised to protect religious
freedom will instead curtail it. If anyone is creating an intimidating and
hostile environment it is the EU, and if anyone is being harassed, it is
those expressing unpopular views. As noted by Andrea Williams of
Christian Concern, “Rather than protecting people against harassment,
the harassment provisions become nothing less than a licence to harass
those who disagree with one’s views.”36 Some suggest the first action
under the Directive should be a suit against the EU (which of course
claims immunity for itself).
It is difficult to imagine a more draconian prescription for suppress-
ing freedom of expression and enriching those intent on doing so. In
what amounts to a coup d’état, comparable in scale to the Nazi Enabling
Law, the proposed Article 13 provides that all existing law deemed con-
trary to the vague “principle of equal treatment” are summarily
repealed: “any laws, regulations, and administrative provisions contrary
to the principle of equal treatment are immediately abolished.”
Any unguarded comment will become grounds for a crippling suit by
anyone who chooses to take offense—or to make a quick profit. “When
a law vaguely regulates free expression, as does the Directive, an omi-
nous chill on the exercise of fundamental freedoms accompanies its
implementation. The chill is especially bitter when an accused faces
unlimited monetary sanctions, as one does under the Directive,” argues
Christian Concern. “Compelled by the piercing chill of an unpredictable
35. See chapter IV, under “Islamism as a Sexual Ideology.”

36. Christian Concern For Our Nation and the Christian Legal Centre Response to the
Government Equalities Office UK Consultation on the European Commission’s Proposal for
an Equal Treatment Directive (London: Christian Concern, 2009), 5 (http://www.ccfon.
org/docs/CCFON_and_CLC_Response_to_GEO_Consultation_on_the_EU_Equal_Tre
atment_Directive_24_July_2009.pdf).
financial penalty, members of the public cease to exercise their basic lib-
erties. They fear to assemble, pray, preach, worship, or even speak.”37
The very method by which this measure is being enacted reflects a
culture of censorship. It is being negotiated in secret at the EU, and
requests for documents by citizen groups have been denied. Christian
Concern’s apocalyptic scenario is not far-fetched: “Those with an anti-
Christian agenda will wield a weapon capable of extinguishing Chris-
tian expression in Europe.”38 If not all dissenting expression.
Finally—and this cannot be emphasized enough, especially for
Christians who now claim persecution—it is striking how much of this
modus operandi originated in Anglo-American divorce law: the vagary
and nebulousness of the transgression, the central role of the accuser’s
subjective “feelings,” the presumption of guilt against the accused, the
power of the accuser to loot the accused through civil procedures that
require no concrete proof, the ease with which a “civil” matter turns
into incarceration without trial—all this was put in place by feminists
for use against fathers and men, while Christians (who once claimed
authority over marriage and in whose churches the marriages often
took place) steadfastly look the other way. As Pastor Martin Niemoeller
famously warned, those who hold their tongues as others are led away
in handcuffs will have no one to speak out when the persecutors come
for them.
The United Nations

Critics of the UN often dismiss it as an ineffectual, and therefore innoc-
uous, international debating forum with little tangible impact on inter-
national affairs. Yet beneath the media radar screen, UN operatives are
active in ways most people are completely unaware. Feminists in partic-
ular, write Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, “have turned the
United Nations, which began with the limited goal of preventing wars,
into the global headquarters of feminist missionaries.” In UN docu-
ments, “‘peace’, ‘justice,’ and ‘development’ are linked over and over
again with women,” they point out. “The unavoidable implication is
that only women want these good things or that only women have the
innate skills to produce and sustain them.”39
Some 1,300 “gender focal points” exist to address “women” or “gen-

38. Ibid., 4.
39. Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame
to Systemic Discrimination against Men (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 401,
398.
der” in the UN system, according to feminists who insist it is not

enough.40 Whereas governments of free societies do not adopt official
ideologies for officials to impose on citizens, feminism (“gender per-
spective”) is unquestionably the official political doctrine of the UN,
whose agencies are required to incorporate it “in all policies and pro-
grams.”41 One UN administrative office—the equivalent of a civil ser-
vice agency that is normally required to be a politically neutral
implementer of policy and refrain from political advocacy—promises
that it “will advocate for legal reforms and adoption of policies and pro-
grammes that will raise the status of girls and women both in the family
and in society.”42 Hundreds of offices and officials, “including the United
Nations Secretariat, regional commissions, funds, programmes, special-
ized agencies, and academic and research institutions” are all devoted to
(in the ubiquitous if oxymoronic phrase) the “promotion of gender
equality and the empowerment of women,” according to Womenwatch,
which describes itself as “the central gateway to information and
resources on the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of
women throughout the United Nations system.” This agency is itself the
creation of an “interagency network” of agencies devoted to gender and
women: “It was founded by the Division for the Advancement of Women
(DAW), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM),
and United Nations International Research and Training Institute for
the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).” It is administered “by a task-
force of the Inter-Agency Network, led by the Division for the Advance-
ment of Women. A Policy Advisory Group (currently comprised of the
Gender Focal Points in DPI, FAO, ILO, INSTRAW, ITU, Regional Com-
missions (ECA, ECE, ECLAC, ESCAP, ESCWA, and Regional Commis-
sions New York Office), UNDP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UN-HABITAT,
UNICEF, UNIFEM, WHO, and DAW) . . . [sic].”43
Virtually every UN agency has its own internal office dealing specifi-
cally with women’s “empowerment.” Not a single such agency exists for
men (or for families that include men), despite the fact that men are the
overwhelming majority of war casualties, AIDS victims, victims of
occupational injuries and deaths, victims of incarceration, and more.
40. Jacqui True, “Mainstreaming Gender in International Institutions,” in Laura

Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), 196.
41. Ibid., 190.
42. Quoted in Douglas Silva, The United Nations Children’s Fund: Women or Chil-
dren First? (New York: Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, 2003), 85, https://c-
fam.org/white_paper/united-nations-childrens-fund-women-or-children-first/.
43. Womenwatch website: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ianwge/activities/wome
nwatch.htm (November 2010).
Not content with this, feminists have long agitated for the creation of
a single mega-agency, which duly came into existence in 2010 (though
without abolishing the 1,300 “focal points,” which continue to exist) and
is known as UN Women. It is not entirely clear what this means, but like
any government agency, UN Women is already spawning its own clien-
tele of pressure groups clamoring for their share of funding. Though
ostensibly “non-governmental”—and, like the hangers-on of the EU,
referring to themselves as “civil society”—these groups are in fact
funded by the UN itself and Western governments, giving them a stake
in the UN’s own funding, and effectively making them extensions of it.
GEAR advertises itself as a coalition of hundreds of women’s groups, all
with a stake in expanding the UN’s feminist apparat. GEAR’s website
contains little on substantive issues; instead, every page indicates a sin-
gle-minded pursuit of “power” and “empowerment,” seemingly for its
own sake. GEAR was a major force in creating UN Women. Having
achieved that, they now claim that the mega-agency will usurp power
from the 1,300 mini-agencies. So one women’s agency at the UN
oppresses other women’s agencies at the UN, who in turn oppress the
mega-agency, and more women than ever are oppressed, a lamentable
situation that can only be remedied by creating more paid positions for
members of GEAR. Despite these hundreds of agencies and six world-
wide conferences on women, GEAR believes that the UN itself is
engaged in the “systematic oppression of women” using “the most
destructive cultural practices of all time.” “Its culture . . . is harmful to
women,” insists GEAR (in a paper published by the UN). “It’s time to
remove the UN’s ‘aura of morality.’”44
As indicated, the UN has now devoted some six major international
conferences to women, far more than on any other topic. “Conferences”
is in fact a misleading term for gatherings whose purpose is to finalize
manifestos that have already circulated in draft among feminists, while
excluding others. These taxpayer-funded “conferences” are closed to the
public and press.
The outcomes are largely a foregone conclusion, since they are orga-
nized, controlled, and dominated throughout by feminists who are
well-practiced at marginalizing anyone who disagrees with them. Femi-
nists receive favored treatment in almost all events and venues and are
44. Paula Donovan, “Gender Equality Now or Never: A New UN Agency for Wom-
en,” Office of the UN Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa (2006), 3. This paper, advocating
an expansion of UN power, is published by an office of the UN itself. Ethical democratic
governments prohibit their functionaries from engaging in advocacy that increases their
own authority.
invited to official meetings from which their opponents are excluded.

The discrimination is so blatant that two feminist scholars observe,
albeit with some understatement, that feminists’ opponents “have to
counter UN bureaucracy and unfair treatment used to keep them out of
important UN meetings.” Many governments, foremost the United
States, “have occasionally included feminists on state delegations sent to
UN conferences and meetings, thus giving some feminists access to
negotiation sessions from which NGOs are otherwise unrepresented.”
Non-feminists expecting to be heard at the women’s conferences “found
themselves not only encountering a strongly organized feminist NGO
sector with some ‘inside’ connections, but also a draft agreement, the
bulk of which had been negotiated months earlier. In effect, they arrived
too late to set the negotiations agenda and . . . were left countering only
the most extreme effects of feminist policies.”45 And this account is
from feminist scholars.
Non-feminist groups naturally concur that the process is rigged. UN
officials limit their numbers (though not feminists’) at UN conferences,
and committee chairs employ diversionary tactics to prevent them
being heard.46 Kathryn Balmforth claims “unfair negotiating proce-
dures, deliberately designed to place the more socially conservative
countries at a disadvantage”:
Long documents are negotiated under severe time pressure. Conten-
tious issues are allowed to accumulate at the end of a session, when
they are negotiated in non-stop meetings. Often, there are several con-
troversial items being negotiated simultaneously in separate groups,
usually without translation. Smaller delegations simply don’t have the
manpower to be everywhere at once, and damaging language is
sneaked into documents before all delegations have time to review it,
digest it, and react.
Balmforth describes “stacking of the deck,” when “the Secretariat—
which is supposed to be neutral—presents documents for negotiation
which are heavily skewed toward the anti-family ideology” using “vague
and obscure language” whose meaning is subject to manipulation and
alteration.
Balmforth and others allege that feminists exert “economic and other
pressure on developing countries, forcing them to drop opposition to
the anti-family agenda.” Here again, the distinction between a country’s
45. Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41–42.
46. Ibid., 148 note 4.
official delegation, that ostensibly speaks for all its people, and a pres-
sure group or “non-governmental” organization, that represents an
ideological interest, is blurred. “Special interest groups can claim seats
on national delegations, from which they negotiate documents calling
for more money and power to be given to themselves,” Balmforth adds.
“At the . . . Cairo+5 meetings, over 40 seats on national delegations
were occupied by so-called ‘family planning’ groups, who have a vested
interest—sometimes a monetary interest—in promoting abortion and
radical concepts of ‘reproductive rights’ for children.”47
Sharon Slater of Family Watch International argues that wealthy
nations with feminist agendas use their muscle to push aside smaller
and poorer developing countries, who are much less sympathetic to rad-
ical sexual changes. At one conference, the chairperson announced that
the UN delegates would be negotiating various segments of the confer-
ence document simultaneously in different rooms. This immediately
put poor nations at a disadvantage as many did not have enough dele-
gates to send to each room. It is the developing nations that usually sup-
port pro-family positions at the UN, so it seemed this was a calculated
move. The lack of translators means that “people from the United States,
Canada, and fluent English speakers from the European Union domi-
nated the proceedings.” Here again, feminists from ostensibly private
pressure groups upstage official delegates representing entire nations.
“Some UN delegates also had to remain standing even though NGO
representatives, who are supposed to be observers, had prominent
places at the table.” “One NGO representative proceeded to present her
feminist ‘wish list’ of proposed amendments to the document. It seemed
that the feminist NGO representatives were running the show, and it
was difficult to distinguish between them and the UN government dele-
gates.”48
Feminists respond that conservative Christian activists during the
Bush administration were able to imitate such practices. “Under
Bush . . . CR [Christian Right] activists have been included as official
representatives on the US state delegation to US conferences, such as the
2002 World Summit on Children, a position the CR heavily criticized
when occupied by feminists.”49 One is tempted to ask what choice they
had, if those are the rules that feminists had already established. But the
47. Kathryn Balmforth, “Hijacking Human Rights,” speech delivered at the World
Congress of Families, 14–17 November 1999, WCF website: http://www.worldcongress.
org/wcf2_spkrs/wcf2_balmforth.htm.
48. Slater, Stand, 3.
49. Buss and Herman, Globalizing Family Values, 53.
larger criticism shows once again how feminist politics, particularly in

the international sphere, is spearheading the larger degeneration of
political ethics.
Over 3,000 such organizations have accredited consultative status
with the Economic and Social Council of the UN, the main body deal-
ing with social, family, and gender issues, authorizing them to lobby the
UN. (The UN chooses and vets the groups it permits to lobby itself.) Of
these, “only about 20 work . . . to protect the family, and, of those 20,
only a small number regularly participate in UN conferences.”50
As we just saw, the UN blurs the distinction between official delega-
tions who represent member countries and NGOs (or interest groups).
In free societies a distinction between public and private is essential to
preventing improper influence. Yet, because the UN is not really a gov-
ernment (though it is funded by taxpayers), few rules regulate its rela-
tions with “non-governmental” organizations (since, in some undefined
sense, it is one itself). Thus its agencies are free to “partner” with sym-
pathetic pressure groups, while ignoring or excluding those its employ-
ees do not like, blurring the distinction between public and private,
which is always a prescription for corruption.
UN officials and feminist groups are in constant contact with one
another through backchannels and informal methods to advance the
sexual agenda, largely by placing feminists from ostensibly private
groups into UN positions. Feminist groups “are constantly calling upon
their sister groups throughout the world to submit nominees for UN
treaty monitoring committees and high-level UN positions to fill posi-
tions with their people.”51 In 1996, feminist groups, high-level UN offi-
cials, and members of treaty committees held an unofficial, closed-door
meeting in Glen Cove, New York to advance feminist goals without dis-
senting groups permitted to attend.52
As in the EU, these UN-approved pressure groups refer to themselves
as “civil society,” but here too they are inverting the meaning of that
term to the precise opposite of what plain English suggests and cashing
in on the moral authority earned by true civil society institutions. The
term became fashionable after the 1989 collapse of European Commu-
nism to signify pluralistic social institutions that sustain a free society
50. Slater, Stand, 2 note 4.

51. Ibid., 26.
52. Douglas Silva and Susan Yoshihara, Rights by Stealth: The Role of Human Rights
Treaty Bodies in the Campaign for an International Right to Abortion (New York: Catholic
Family and Human Rights Institute, 2009, http://www.c-fam.org/docLib/20100126_IOR
G_W_Paper_Number8FINAL.pdf).
precisely because they are not controlled by the state: churches, chari-
ties, reform movements, nonprofit organizations, unions. These stood
in sharp contrast to the officially approved—and therefore fraudu-
lent—versions sponsored by the Stalinist states of East-Central Europe.
By supporting and co-opting these groups with taxpayer money, the
UN, EU, and national governments are creating neo-Soviet mockeries
of “civil society.” Balmforth describes how the UN sponsors so-called
“civil society” events. These events are funded with public money, but
the participants are hand-selected and the outcomes pre-determined.
The outcomes of these events are then presented to UN delegates as the
view of all of “civil society,” in an attempt to make them feel isolated and
to pressure them into submission.53
With the deck thus stacked, the results are profoundly hostile to fam-
ilies, parents, religious believers, and men. Austin Ruse describes the
“agreement” reached at the “Cairo +5” conference:
the word “father” appears twice in the document, “men” once, “boy”
four times. The word “family” appears 29 times but almost always in
the phrase “family planning.” The word “parents” appears once and
then only to tell governments that parents should be taught about the
need for childhood sex-ed. On the other hand, “sex” appears 62 times,
“gender” 59 times, and the term “reproductive health,” always a code
word for abortion, appears 103 times.54
One agency starkly illustrates the transformation of the UN from
effectively a humanitarian organization to an ideological lobby that
“consciously and consistently embrace[s] a newly dominant ideology
. . . of radical feminism.” The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was so
effective in its early years at raising levels of immunization that it saved
the lives of some 25 million children. But changes culminating in the
appointment of feminist Carol Bellamy as director in 1995 began its
descent into political advocacy. Douglas Silva emphasizes (as we have
elsewhere and will again) the ideological dimension of the change: “The
intellectual and philosophical underpinning for this transformation was
radical feminism.” UNICEF’s politicization began with feminist-driven
programs to “protect” children not from specific health risks but from
ill-defined “violence, exploitation, abuse, and discrimination”—in
other words, from their own parents. Silva poses questions that might
profitably be asked of others claiming to advocate for victims of “dis-
crimination”: “What exactly is meant by discrimination? Who is being
53. Balmforth, “Hijacking Human Rights.”

54. Quoted in Buss and Herman, Globalizing Family Values, 112.
discriminated against, and how does UNICEF address this discrimina-

tion?”55 One might also ask why their parents cannot protect them from
violence, exploitation, and abuse, and whether parents themselves,
rather than disease, have become the main targets of UNICEF’s efforts
at eradication.
Friction soon developed between an agency dedicated to children’s
welfare and feminists trying to liberate women from their children.
“These pro-women activist groups” thought that UNICEF needed “to
focus on a woman’s own priorities . . . rather than decide for her that
her children must come first,” writes one participant in a program
whose top priority was supposed to be children. “A woman had a right
to be the person she wanted to be and not be forced into carrying out
male-defined stereotypes.” Indeed, as “the battle raged over whether
‘children must come first’ at the UN Children’s Fund,” feminists eventu-
ally ensured that UNICEF put women’s empowerment first and chil-
dren’s welfare second by insisting that programs be “based on the
principle of equal sharing of family responsibilities and . . . consistent
with the policies for promoting women’s employment.” Feminist ideol-
ogy was codified when its board required that “within each programme
and sector, women’s roles needed to be analyzed, and the inequalities
stemming from gender had to be made a target of affirmative action,”
according to one account. “From then on, every UNICEF situation
analysis and country programme must fully incorporate the gender
dimension.”56
One program targeted girls specifically for education in “gender the-
ory and radical feminist thought.” “Programming for girls would now
become programming . . . based on explicitly feminist thought.” Indoc-
trinating girls politically allowed feminists “to re-dedicate themselves to
the work of aiding children, work some of them had come to ignore
because of children’s association with motherhood and traditional
female roles.” Girls would be educated in “gender-sensitive schools” that
give “particular attention to the gender dimensions” of education “by
removing gender bias and discrimination from textbooks, teaching
methods, classroom interactions, and curricula . . . and by recruiting
and training teachers, principals, supervisors, and other administrators
to be sensitive to gender.”57
The campaign had the added virtue of keeping boys in ignorance.
ppp
55. Silva, United Nations Children’s Fund, 1, 6–7, 68, 9.

56. Ibid., 69, 88, 72.
57. Ibid., 74, 75, 80–81.
“Not a word is said about any direct intervention to increase the enroll-
ment of boys, even though 73% of boys in sub-Saharan Africa do not
attend school,” and boys were already disadvantaged compared to girls
in entire regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean. “In a world
in which children, both boys and girls, suffer on a massive scale . . . the
suffering of girls now seems to take precedence at UNICEF,” writes
Silva. “When boys are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, it simply
seems that this disadvantage does not matter.” To the extent that they
merit any attention, boys (like men) need ideological consciousness-
raising and political re-education. In UNICEF’s words: “For the rights
of girls and women to be fulfilled, boys and men must be educated—in
schools, health clinics, youth clubs, religious institutions, businesses,
the military and police—to ‘unlearn’ negative patterns of behaviour and
learn positive new behaviours.”58
UNICEF’s re-education and behavior-modification techniques
would not be limited to public institutions. UNICEF not only violates
the ethical principle that administrative agencies should not endorse
ideology and engage in advocacy, it likewise imposes that ideology on
private households. UNICEF demands “parent and caregiver education
programmes that incorporate components of behaviour change and
development, in order to develop attitudes and practices that demon-
strate and promote gender equality.” Parents who fail to exhibit the
required “behaviour change” and inculcate it in their own children will
feel the presence of UNICEF officials, who promise to “Intervene early
to stem the negative consequences of discrimination against girls, ste-
reotyping of male and female roles and models of behaviour, and the
belief that male domination and violence against women and girls are
natural, all of which start very early in the family.”59
Predictably, fathers have no role in UNICEF’s understanding of chil-
dren’s well-being. “Fathers are mentioned as perpetrators of gender bias
and discrimination, and therefore in need of re-education or re-social-
ization,” writes Silva. “They are not mentioned as positive role models,
as integral to the upbringing of healthy and well-adjusted children.”
Consistent with the absence of any UN agencies to address the problems
of men, “according to UNICEF, there is not one current infringement of
fathers’ rights or the rights of men that is worthy of being addressed.”60
Until recently, attempts to introduce homosexual politics at the UN
ppp
58. Ibid., 81, 76, 79, 86.

59. Ibid., 83–84.
60. Ibid., 84–85.
have been frustrated by nations from the global South, with mostly tra-
ditional values. No binding UN document has ever recognized “sexual
orientation” as a human right, and homosexuality has never been made
a protected category in any binding UN document. “However, in just
ten short years the issue has gone from relative obscurity to human
rights primacy,” writes a recent observer. “A radical shift has taken place
at the UN, leading to the first ever resolution being adopted on ‘sexual
orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ in 2011.”61 Under feminist tutelage,
homosexualists are learning to use the same high-pressure methods. As
of this writing, a battle rages at the UN over creating a czar to combat
“discrimination and violence” against homosexuals. The 54-nation
African Group was “disturbed” by the incessant focus on “sexual inter-
ests and behaviors.” “The African Group is strongly concerned by the
attempts to introduce and impose new notions and concepts that are
not internationally agreed upon,” said Botswana’s ambassador.62
Human Rights: Still More Gender Crimes

The entrenched and growing power of sexual ideologues at the UN and
other international organizations is subtly but dramatically altering the
nature of diplomacy. The traditional diplomatic instruments were trea-
ties, agreements between sovereign states on external matters such as
alliances and trade. Under UN influence, treaties increasingly resemble
domestic legislation, regulating the behavior not of sovereign states but
of the populations and individuals within them. Here again, the van-
guard of the trend is sexual radicalism.
The principal justification allowing treaties to become instruments
for breaking down national sovereignty and controlling individuals’
behavior is “human rights.” At one time human rights entailed pressur-
ing authoritarian regimes to end repression of their people, and it was
on (and only on) this assumption that the public was brought on board
the human rights campaign.63 With little discussion or scrutiny,
“human rights” has expanded into a free-for-all, a grab bag into which
one can toss almost any political agenda, however distantly connected
ppp
61. Paul Coleman, “The ‘SOGI Movement’ at the United Nations: From Obscurity to
Primacy in Ten Years and the Implications for Religious Liberty,” International Journal
for Religious Freedom, vol. 6, nos. 1–2 (2013).
62. “Countries Take up Positions Ahead of UN Vote on LGBT Rights,” C-Fam inter-
net site, 11 November 2016, https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/countries-take-positions-ahead
-un-vote-lgbt-rights/.
63. James Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 1, 7, 12.
to the original understanding of the term. In the name of human rights,

we now undertake campaigns to legislate contentious social policies and
claim the authority to control other nations’ spending decisions and
mandate welfare programs. Recent innovations demand the prosecu-
tion of not only government officials but private citizens for “human
rights” violations. Ironically, “human rights” is even used to rationalize
suspension of due process protections and incarcerations without trial.
We now presume to supervise how private individuals conduct their
personal lives in the privacy of their own homes and prosecute them as
human rights violators if we disapprove. Some campaigns conducted in
the name of human rights now have aims precisely opposite to what the
term suggests in plain English, to the point where “human rights are
threatened in the name of human rights.”64
Here too, the cutting edge is sexual. According to UNICEF, “if a hus-
band and wife arrange their lives so that the husband works outside the
home and the wife works within the home, caring for the children, the
husband actually violates his wife’s human rights,” writes one observer.
“The husband, therefore, must be re-educated.”65
This shift has been driven by a view of human rights that makes it the
property not of the universality of humanity (as the term itself was cre-
ated to suggest) but of political groups seeking “power” over others. As
one advocate writes, “Today, recourse to human rights discourse in
order to make claims on behalf of individual people or specific social
groups is so widespread in international politics that it might be
described as ‘hegemonic.’” Not substantial and specifically defined
rights, but a nebulous “human rights discourse” is openly acknowl-
edged to operate as a “useful political tool” less to protect individuals
from repression than to advance political agendas. (One target is “mul-
tinational corporations.”)66 On this view, human rights are not “univer-
sal” and equally applicable to all. Instead they are a means or
“instrument” to other, more political ends that benefit particular inter-
ests competing for “power” with others. “International human rights
law is a peaceful but powerful instrument of change,” writes Geraldine
Van Bueren. “Human rights is about peacefully redistributing unequal
power. The essence of economic and social . . . rights is that they involve
ppp
64. “On Human Rights: A Statement of the Ramsey Colloquium,” First Things 82
(April 1998), 18–22 (http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9804/articles/ramsey.html).
65. Silva, United Nations Children’s Fund, 83.
66. Jill Steans, “Body Politics: Human Rights in International Relations,” in Laura
Shepherd (ed.), Gender Matters in Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), 76.
redistribution, a task with which, despite the vision of human rights,

most constitutional courts and regional and international tribunals are
distinctively uncomfortable.”67
Here human rights is no longer a constitutional limitation on gov-
ernment power and its abuse to preserve the freedom of all. Instead it is
what Van Bueren calls an “ideology,” conferring increased government
power on some groups for use against others.68
Nowhere is this more advanced than where human rights is invoked
to support innovations in social policy, specifically in the area of the
family, gender relations, and sexuality (from which the last few quota-
tions are all taken). As Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young point out,
the very concept of “women’s rights” is inconsistent with “human”
rights. “Human Rights are universal; they apply by definition to all
human beings,” they write. “Women’s rights, by definition, apply only to
women.”69
Today this is by far the most militant and ideologically charged area
of human rights politics: “The incorporation of women’s rights issues
into human rights practice is a revolutionary and evolutionary pro-
cess.”70 Feminists celebrate how their “revolutionary” methods have
altered the very meaning of “human rights,” overriding the objections of
those whose aim was to control repression:
Campaigns and interventions of feminist movements all over the
world have forced the human rights movement to undergo a radical
change by redefining the concept of “human rights.” Although com-
mitted to the notion of “universal human rights,” feminist activists and
scholars have nevertheless argued that human rights are not static and
fixed but are determined by historical moments and struggles . . . in
the process, expanding the meaning of “rights” to incorporate their
own hopes and needs.71
67. Geraldine Van Bueren, “Combating Child Poverty—Human Rights Approaches,”

Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3 (August 1999), 680–1, quoted in Michael Farris,
“Nannies in Blue Berets: Understanding the United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child,” Regent Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 2, no. 1 (2010), 95.
68. One enterprise advertises its services as “a human rights practitioner.” Appar-
ently human rights is now a marketable commodity where customers can expect to
receive the quantity they pay for (Nathanson and Young, Legalizing Misandry, 218–19).
69. Nathanson and Young, Legalizing Misandry, 393.
70. Dorothy Thomas and Michele Beasley, “Domestic Violence as a Human Rights
Issue,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 1 (February 1993), 62.
71. Saba Bahar, “Human Rights Are Women’s Rights: Amnesty International and the
Family,” Hypatia, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1996), 105.
This openly acknowledges that feminists have politicized human

rights and appropriated it to advance the political “struggle” against men
and other opponents. “Women’s groups . . . are increasingly utilising the
language of rights in gender struggles” one feminist scholar acknowl-
edges.72 Here again, human rights changes from a universal code of spe-
cific rights to be protected equally for all and becomes a “language” or
“discourse,” a rhetorical “tool” to be invoked when convenient to
advance what is in reality the pursuit of self-interested “power” by “spe-
cific social groups”: “The language of human rights and human rights
convention provide a useful tool for activists seeking to ‘empower’
women.” Rather than fixed principles, the influential Charlotte Bunch
argues, “human rights are dynamic and flexible, providing a useful lan-
guage in which to frame issues and a powerful political tool to advance
feminist objectives” because they lend “gravitas” to that political
agenda.73 This refrain is repeated almost verbatim in dozens of articles
that saturate the self-referential world of feminist scholarship: “Human
rights discourse is a powerful tool for affecting political processes at the
national and international level,” writes Donna Sullivan. “Gender-spe-
cific abuses have yet to be fully integrated into that discourse.”74
This shift is huge. Moral capital built up by decades of high-risk cam-
paigning against repression, torture, mass killings, and other atrocities
by regimes of left and right is appropriated to justify a grab for political
power by an ideological interest. Feminists even boast that they are
undermining the foundations and principles that have protected the
rights of individuals for centuries:
Feminist human rights activists are . . . doing more than merely
expanding the notion of human rights. They are questioning the polit-
ical and social foundations on which the notion of “rights” rests; they
are undermining the distinction between public and private and chal-
lenging the social contract which is the basis of such distinctions. . . .
To incorporate the demands . . . of this movement, therefore, involves
more than merely focusing on woman’s human rights; it demands a
reconsideration of the definition of “human rights,” of social contract
72. “The principle of struggle,” wrote Polish dissident Tadeusz Mazowiecki, “sooner
or later leads to elimination of one’s opponent.” Gale Stokes (ed.), From Stalinism to
Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 229.
73. Steans, “Body Politics,” 75, 85, 78.
74. Donna Sullivan, “The Public/Private Distinction in International Human Rights
Law,” in Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (eds.), Women’s Rights Human Rights: Interna-
tional Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1995), 126.
theory, of theories of the family, and of the relationship between the

state and the gendered citizen.75
As this passage openly celebrates, the feminists’ redefinition of
human rights directly inverts the traditional understanding of the term.
Far from protecting the private individual from state intrusion, femi-
nism creates an invasive ethic that denies any distinction between public
and private or any private sphere of life beyond the reach of state power.
The main targets are family and personal privacy.
The earliest modern human rights agreements explicitly treated pri-
vate life and the family as realms to be protected. The Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights (1948) states (Article 16.3), “The family is the
natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protec-
tion by society and the State,” and it makes other provisions for the pro-
tection of family privacy and marriage. It also declares (Article 26.3)
that “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that
shall be given to their children.”
Noteworthy here is that the Western democracies were the sexual
innovators. Britain and the United States joined the Soviet Union in
strenuously opposing this language, and the three post-war powers
resisted any recognition of the family in the Universal Declaration.76
The Declaration is backed by the International Covenant of Eco-
nomic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) which states even more
strongly (Article 10.1), “The widest possible protection and assistance
should be accorded to the family, which is the natural and fundamental
group unit of society, particularly for its establishment and while it is
responsible for the care and education of dependent children.” It also
assumes marriage as the basis of the family and provides for the rights
of parents (Article 13.3): “The States Parties to the present Covenant
undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applica-
ble, legal guardians to choose for their children schools, other than
those established by the public authorities, which conform to such min-
imum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the
State and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children
in conformity with their own convictions.” The International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (1966) protects the family (Article 23) and
parental rights (Article 18.4) in language largely identical to the other
measures.
75. Bahar, “Human Rights,” 107.

76. Daniel Cere, “Human Rights and the Family,” Academic Questions, vol. 22, no. 1
(Winter 2008–2009), 72.
Some provisions of these early treaties do appear self-contradictory.

While recognizing marriage as the basis of family life, they also set it up
for failure by providing for the rights of spouses at its “dissolution”—
rights that as we have seen, are not remotely enforced in any country.77
Yet two more recent treaties go much further in undermining family
integrity and private life by specifically targeting private citizens as
human rights violators. Both have been the work of a small number of
operatives, and it is apparent that many governments have signed them
with little understanding of their full implications or commitment to
enforcing their provisions. Yet their implications are nothing short of
revolutionary. At a stroke, they undermine virtually every traditional
authority other than the United Nations, from the national sovereignty
of signatory states down to the family and parents. As such, they vividly
demonstrate why the family supports all other social institutions and
why its destruction undermines all social order and freedom.
Like the early treaties but more controversially, the newer treaties
establish committees of unelected officials who monitor and evaluate
compliance by signatory governments and their citizens. Though in
theory purely advisory, these committees issue reports on the comport-
ment of countries (and individuals within those countries) and instruc-
tions they must follow. The committees, composed of “experts” in
“women’s” issues, also issue gratuitous opinions or “general comments”
(on what authority it is not clear) about the meaning of the treaties that
often expand their reach.
Women’s Human Rights

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) has radically transformed the treaty-making
process into a vehicle for social engineering. Drafted in the 1970s at the
height of the Sexual Revolution, CEDAW requires countries to codify
feminist ideology as official doctrine—a practice forbidden by the con-
stitutions of most democracies, which recognize that beliefs cannot be
given official status if expression is to remain free. Under CEDAW (Arti-
cle 10c), signatories must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate
discrimination against women . . . and . . . any stereotyped concept of
the roles of men and women at all levels and in all forms.” This is taken
literally; even personal beliefs are not exempt from UN oversight. “It
commits governments to intervene in virtually any setting, no matter
how private or consensual, where, in the view of the CEDAW commit-
77. Ibid.; Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage,
and the Family (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2007).
tee, women are not considered equal,” writes one observer. “It contains
language calling for the most intrusive government imaginable—gov-
ernment which intrudes into the most private and sacred areas.”78 One
passage (Article 5a) requires signatory governments to engineer changes
not only in society but in people’s minds:
[Governments] shall take all appropriate measures . . . [t]o modify the
social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view
to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other
practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superior-
ity of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.
The CEDAW monitoring committee insists that governments dis-
seminate propaganda to their populations. “States should introduce
education and public information programmes to help eliminate preju-
dices that hinder women’s equality” and “public information and edu-
cation programmes to change attitudes concerning the roles and status
of men and women.”79 The CEDAW committee has repeatedly
expressed its view that governments have a duty to indoctrinate their
citizens in ideology and suppress non-feminist heresies. Toward Indo-
nesia, the committee expressed “great concern about existing social,
religious, and cultural norms that recognize men as the head of the fam-
ily and breadwinner and confine women to the roles of mother and
wife, which are reflected in various laws, Government policies, and
guidelines” and demanded to know “what steps the Government is pro-
posing to take to modify such attitudes.” Likewise, the “Committee is
particularly concerned about the consistent emphasis placed on
women’s roles as mothers and caregivers in Croatian legislation pertain-
ing to a variety of areas.”80
CEDAW insists that even “private” persons are punishable for how
they “discriminate” in their personal associations. “Under CEDAW, even
private behavior—such as how couples divide household and child-care
chores—is subject to government oversight and modification,” accord-
78. Kathryn Balmforth, “Human Rights and the Family,” paper presented at the
World Family Policy Forum, 1999 (http://www.law2.byu.edu/wfpc/forum/1999/balm-
forth.pdf), and “Hijacking Human Rights.”
79. UN Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW), General Recommen-
dations Made by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women,
No. 19, 11th Session, 1992 (http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/recommenda-
tions/recomm.htm#recom19).
80. Quoted in P. Fagan, W. Saunders, and M. Fragoso, How UN Conventions on
Women’s and Children’s Rights Undermine Family, Religion, and Sovereignty (Washing-
ton: Family Research Council, 2009), 10–11.
ing to Christina Hoff Sommers.81 “The UN monitoring committee rou-

tinely censures countries like Denmark, Norway, and Iceland for failing
to prevent women from taking primary care of children, a practice it
deems ‘discriminatory.’”82 Anyone can thus be designated a human
rights violator simply based on his most private and personal relation-
ships. “Discrimination under the Convention is not restricted to action
by or on behalf of Governments,” the committee points out. Article 2(e)
requires governments “to eliminate discrimination against women
by any person.” Article 2(f) requires governments forcibly “to abolish
existing . . . customs and practices which constitute discrimination
against women.” The committee concludes: “States may also be respon-
sible for private acts if they fail to act with due diligence to prevent vio-
lations of rights.”83
CEDAW extends this government-enforced orthodoxy to education,
including private schools and private families. “CEDAW prohibits mak-
ing distinctions between the roles of mother and father, and teaching a
traditional understanding of the family,” writes one analyst. “Children
are to be taught that they can get along just as well with two mothers or
two fathers, and any attempt to show otherwise could be considered
discrimination against women.”84 Children must be taught this in their
own homes.
Having reduced public policy questions into matters of “human
rights” and “discrimination,” CEDAW officials may issue decrees at
whim and without having to consider whether they are feasible, what
the cost might be, or if they might be mutually inconsistent. Thus the
CEDAW committee pushes governments to simultaneously legalize
prostitution and prosecute men for engaging in it. A team of scholars
observes:
This progression, from urging countries that prohibit prostitution to
move quickly to foster a national debate on legalizing the activity to
chastising Germany for not elevating it to the status of a legally pro-
tected profession, is even more startling when one considers that it
contradicts the reasonably clear language of the CEDAW treaty itself,
81. Christina Hoff Sommers, The UN Women’s Treaty: The Case against Ratification
(Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 2010, http://www.aei.org/docLib/20100323-
CEDAW-Sommers.pdf), 5.
82. Christina Hoff Sommers, “The Case against the U.N. Women’s Treaty,” National
Review Online, 16 November 2010, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/253400/case-
against-un-womens-treaty-christina-hoff-sommers#.
83. UNDAW, General Recommendation No. 19.
84. William Estrada, “CEDAW and Homeschooling Families,” HSLDA internet site,
16 July 2009, http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/Issues/U/UN_CEDAW_7162009.asp.
which says, “States Parties shall take all appropriate measures, includ-
ing legislation, to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploita-
tion of prostitution of women.” In the CEDAW committee, it seems
that enabling prostitution is a form of suppressing it!
The contradiction is no accident and captures once again the authori-
tarian dynamic, whereby sexual liberalization is the first step in selective
criminalization. Though CEDAW feminists advocate the legalization of
prostitution, in practice they want laws that criminalize only men.
While the CEDAW committee has pushed Mexico to legalize prostitu-
tion, in the next breath it “strongly recommends that new legislation
should not discriminate against prostitutes but should punish pimps
and procurers.”85
The envisioned equality is more than equality before the law, and
here too CEDAW officials can rule by decree without considering the
costs. Citizens must finance “necessary supporting social services,”
including “a network of child-care facilities” (Article 11(2)(c)). In fact,
the CEDAW committee seems particularly concerned to engineer the
collectivization of childrearing. As Hoff Sommers notes, “Throughout
the treaty, the drafters show a determination to eradicate gender stereo-
types, especially those that associate women with care-giving and moth-
erhood.” Accordingly, governments must supervise private households
to “ensure that family education includes a proper understanding of
maternity as a social function.”86 The CEDAW committee admonishes
New Zealand that “rates of participation [in day care] for mothers of
young children and single mothers remain below the average for States
members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-
ment.”87 Women’s workforce participation seems to be the primary cri-
terion directing CEDAW family policy decrees, and maximum day care
is a goal in itself. The UN scolds Slovakia because the “decrease in pre-
school childcare is particularly detrimental to women’s equal opportu-
nity in the employment market since, owing to lack of childcare, they
have to interrupt their employment career.” The committee demands
that Slovenia create “more formal and institutionalized childcare estab-
lishments for children under three years of age as well as for those from
three to six.” Having as many children as possible in institutional care is
apparently a virtue for its own sake: “The committee expressed disdain
that only 30% of the children under age three were placed in formal day
care, while the rest were cared for by family members and other private
85. Fagan et al., How UN Conventions, 23.

86. Hoff Sommers, UN Women’s Treaty, 13.
87. Quoted in Fagan et al., How UN Conventions, 9–10.
individuals.” Collectivized child-rearing seems to be the committee’s

foremost panacea to combat gender inequality. In Germany, the com-
mittee was “concerned that measures aimed at the reconciliation of
family and work entrench stereotypical expectations for women and men.
In that regard the Committee is concerned with the unmet need for kin-
dergarten places for the 0–3 age group.”88
CEDAW operatives claim authority to curtail religious freedom and
democratic rights when voters disagree with their agenda.89 The fact
that Irish voters have voted down several referenda to legalize abortion
is apparently grounds to limit the freedom of Ireland’s lamentably Cath-
olic voters: “Although Ireland is a secular State, the influence of the
Church is strongly felt not only in attitudes and stereotypes, but also in
official State policy,” the committee notes. “Women’s right to health,
including reproductive health [i.e., abortion], is compromised by this
influence.” Norway’s protection for religious minorities likewise leaves
them free to disagree with feminist doctrine, so Norway should think
twice before allowing religious freedom:
The Committee is especially concerned with provisions in the Norwe-
gian legislation to exempt certain religious communities from compli-
ance with the equal rights law. Since women often face greater
discrimination in family and personal affairs in certain communities
and in religion, they asked the Government to amend the Norwegian
Equal Status Act to eliminate exceptions based on religion.
Indonesia should also curtail religious freedom: “Cultural and religious
values cannot be allowed to undermine the universality of women’s
rights.”90
CEDAW officials openly acknowledge that they are innovating new,
political rights contrary to the values of most societies. The UN’s Spe-
cial Rapporteur on Violence Against Women acknowledges that “The
most controversial [area] is the issue of sexual rights”:
The right to self-determination [of nations] is pitted against the
CEDAW articles that oblige the state to correct any inconsistency
between international human rights laws and the religious and cus-
tomary laws operating within its territory. . . . While international
human rights law moves forward to meet the demands of the interna-
tional women’s movement, the reality in many societies is that women’s
rights are under challenge from alternative cultural expressions. . . .
88. Ibid., 11–12 (emphasis added).

89. See chapter III, under “Religious Belief.”
90. Quoted in Fagan et al., How UN Conventions, 24–25, to which I owe these points.
The movement is not only generating new interpretations of existing

human rights doctrine . . . but it is also generating new rights. The
most controversial is the issue of sexual rights. . . . One can only hope
that the common values of human dignity and freedom will triumph
over parochial forces attempting to confine women to the home.91
Complete gender equality as feminists conceive it, after all, is virtually
impossible to achieve, short of truly totalitarian regulation of citizens’
private lives, since many women make choices different from men’s,
especially once children appear. “If, for example, more women than
men routinely take care of children, the CEDAW committee recom-
mends . . . government-imposed quotas and ‘awareness raising’ cam-
paigns,” notes Hoff Sommers. Her account of Iceland’s experience
shows how open-ended and insatiable the radical agenda must always
be:
Iceland is a very small country, but it has one of the most extensive
gender-equity bureaucracies in the world. As Hanna Gunnsteinsdottir,
head of Iceland’s Department of Equality and Labor, tried to explain to
the CEDAW committee, her country has equity ministers, equity
councils, equity advisers, and a Complaints Committee on Gender
Equality whose rulings are binding. Every other year, a state-mandated
“National Symposium on Gender Equity” educates citizens about sex-
role stereotyping. More than 80% of Icelandic women are in the labor
force, and parents enjoy paid maternity and paternity leave, including
one month of pre-birth leave. Its current prime minister is the first
openly lesbian head of government in the world. No wonder Iceland is
ranked first in the World Economic Forum’s 2009 Global Gender Gap
Report. It would appear to be a model of egalitarianism. Yet it falls
short. The committee praised the island nation for its “strides” toward
gender parity, but several members found it to be remiss in its efforts
to stamp out sexism. Hanna Beate Schopp-Schilling of Germany was
concerned that, despite the government’s multiple gender and equity
committees, the parliament of Iceland itself had no committee on gen-
der equity. The expert from Algeria wanted to know why so few
women were full professors at the University of Iceland. Magalys Aro-
cha Dominguez, from Cuba, was unhappy that many Icelandic women
held part-time jobs and spent much more time than men taking care
of children. She was also displeased by survey findings that Iceland’s
women were allowing family commitments to shape their career
91. Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Reinventing International Law: Women’s Rights as

Human Rights in the International Community,” Harvard Law School, 1997 (http://libra
ry.law.columbia.edu/urlmirror/11/ReinventingInternationalLaw.htm, emphasis added).
choices: “What government measures have been put in place to change

these patterns of behavior?”
The same committee advised Spain to organize a national “awareness
raising campaign against gender roles in the family.” Finland was urged
“to promote equal sharing of domestic and family tasks between
women and men.” Slovakia was instructed to “fully sensitize men to
their equal participation in family tasks and responsibilities.” Liechten-
stein was questioned about a “Father’s Day project” and reminded of
the need to “dismantle gender stereotypes.”
Proponents claim that the treaty is needed for countries where
women are truly oppressed (most of which simply ignore it) and that it
would have minimal affect in the liberal democracies, where its provi-
sions are already observed. But this is not the view of the feminists who
advocate it. Insisting that “American women need legal tools to fight
patriarchy,” Janet Benshoof, president of the Global Justice Center
maintains that “If CEDAW were fully implemented in the United States
it would revolutionize our rights.”92 CEDAW would immediately com-
mit American officials to legislate de facto “equality” (however the femi-
nists pressuring them might choose to define that). According to the
authors of Human Rights for All, “CEDAW calls upon state parties to
adopt temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equal-
ity between men and women.” Such “temporary special measures” are
mandatory quotas. “CEDAW ratification would reflect the country’s
commitment to maintaining temporary special measures that advance
the equal participation of women in civil, political, economic, social,
and cultural arenas until that goal is achieved.” However discriminatory
against men, quotas are not “discrimination” according to CEDAW’s
prerogative to dictate the meanings of words. Article 54 allows that the
guardians of anti-discrimination may themselves discriminate: “Tem-
porary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between
men and women shall not be considered discrimination.”93 As Orwell
predicted.
As we will see elsewhere, CEDAW would alter the structure of the US
government and the authority of the Constitution to limit and define it,
since treaties override internal constitutional provisions limiting the
power of government. US federalism, which precludes federal interven-
tion into areas such as family law and education, would be effectively
abolished and power centralized in the national government to super-
92. Quoted in ibid., 7.

93. Ibid.
vise adherence. CEDAW mandates programs and policies that Ameri-

cans have explicitly rejected, such as paid maternity leave, government-
funded daycare, and equal pay for comparable (rather than equal or the
same) work. Kathryn Balmforth argues that “It would be the sheerest
folly to subordinate, in even the slightest degree, our right to make our
own laws in this purely domestic area to any international treaty
body.”94
The effects would be, effectively, a coup d’état. Feminist operatives
could simply sue their way into political office, appealing to their allies
in the judiciary while bypassing the electorate and democratic checks
and balances. “Under CEDAW,” Benshoof exults forthrightly, “we
could . . . sue the government to address the shameful fact that there is
only one woman on the Supreme Court, no women running the Penta-
gon, and a Congress with only 16% women.”95 Though these ratios have
increased since she stated this, the principle of filling offices by lawsuit
would be further institutionalized. In short, CEDAW would give “the
activists and lawyers of NCRW, NOW, and the Feminist Majority the
license to sue, re-educate, and re-socialize their fellow citizens—oppor-
tunities that have eluded them under the [US] Constitution.”96
Finally, CEDAW prohibits all sex differentiation in one area where it
is essential: the military. “CEDAW would invalidate all Defense Depart-
ment regulations that treat women differently, including women’s
exemptions from direct combat on land, sea, and in the air,” according
to the Center for Military Readiness. “At risk are countless laws, rules,
and private practices that distinguish between the sexes or benefit
women as a class. Military regulations governing personal misconduct
such as adultery also would be subject to challenge by CEDAW bureau-
crats.”97
Children’s Human Rights

The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is even more
invasive than CEDAW. Like the Anglo-American divorce law after which
it is modeled, the CRC uses children as leverage to control the intimate
private lives of their parents. As Phyllis Schlafly writes about “children’s
rights” defense:
94. Quoted in ibid., 5.

95. Quoted in Ibid., 8.
96. Ibid., 15–17, 20.
97. “CEDAW = US Military Under UN Control,” Center for Military Readiness
internet site: http://www.cmrlink.org/content/families-and-children/34450/cedaw_u_s_
military_under_un_control, 10 October 2002.
The movement declares itself to be more interested in the welfare of

children than their own parents are. It promises to give children legal
sanctions against their parents, and in so doing, pits the interests of
children against mom and dad. The inescapable implication is that
children are not in safe hands with their own parents and that a whole
movement must be called into being in order to protect them. Anti-
family propaganda teaches that mothers and fathers are, at best, inade-
quate and, at worst, hostile to the needs of their children.98
The UN and other international bodies have long professed deep
concern about the sufferings of children. Yet by their own account, none
of their extensive assortment of programs over decades seems to have
helped children in the least: “In spite of the comprehensive framework
of instruments, standards, and commitments on the rights of the child
. . . the daily reality for millions of children worldwide is still in sharp
contrast to these commitments and objectives.” Or perhaps because of
them:
Children still face major threats to survival, lack opportunities for
quality education, proper health and social care; they are victims of
[the] worst forms of child labour, sexual exploitation and abuse, dis-
eases, armed conflict, [and] various forms of violence; they are forced
into early marriages and have to endure harmful traditional practices.
Children belonging to vulnerable groups or children in particularly
difficult situations face particular risks and are exposed to discrimina-
tion, marginalization, and exclusion. Girl children face specific risks
and need particular attention.99
It is not clear how a UN treaty can possibly protect children from this
hodgepodge of disparate and ill-defined horrors (“harmful traditional
practices”). Most of these problems—the ones that are problems and
not ideological grievances—proceed largely from the poverty and insta-
bility chronic in much of the world. Children suffer them in common
with the rest of the population, including their parents. Most are not
crimes in any ordinary or enforceable sense of that word, and to use
them to rationalize separating out children from everyone else, includ-
ing their own parents, and accusing their parents of crimes, is the most
cynical posturing and simply constitutes another form of exploitation
in many ways far more cruel than what the children already endure.
These problems certainly cannot be solved by creating new global pow-
98. Schlafly, Who Killed, 205.

99. EU Guidelines for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of the Child (http:
//www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/16031.07.pdf, n.d., accessed August 2010),
3.
ers to confiscate children from their parents and criminalize parents. Yet
that is precisely the sleight-of-hand that the CRC tries to pull off.
Like CEDAW, the CRC claims to govern the internal affairs and pop-
ulations of signatory states and creates a compliance committee to scold
them for inevitably falling short. But the CRC goes further: it under-
mines not only national sovereignty but the authority of elected repre-
sentatives at the national, state, and local levels; it diminishes the
authority of state and local governments vis-à-vis federal or national
ones; it bypasses constitutional protections for citizens’ freedom; and
above all it extinguishes the authority of parents. At a stroke, the CRC
undermines every authority below the UN level: parents and the family,
local and state governments, and national or federal governments, each
of whose authority is transferred up to the next level and ultimately to
the UN. As such, one sympathetic writer comments, “the CRC provides
an ideology for state intervention” into not only social and economic
matters but even the most intimate corners of private life.100 Like
CEDAW only more so, it is not a limitation on government power but,
precisely the opposite, a rationalization for expanding and centralizing
it. “Ten individuals will dictate to the hundreds of millions of parents in
the world how to raise their children.”101
The CRC constitutes one of the most dramatic power shifts imagin-
able by a single document. Children cannot claim “rights” against any-
one other than their own parents, since their parents are their defenders
against everyone else. The CRC therefore has the power to set children
against their parents, criminalize law-abiding citizens, centralize power
away from local to national government, mandate increases in govern-
ment spending without taxpayer consent, bypass elected representatives
and all democratic decision-making, and abrogate virtually all constitu-
tional limitations on government power.
Areas of jurisdiction now constitutionally forbidden to national or
federal governments would become subjects of mandated government
intervention. In countries like the US, where family law is still (in the-
ory) within state jurisdiction, the CRC transfers an array of powers
from states to the central government, including such vast areas of poli-
cymaking as education and health care. National and federal govern-
100. Van Bueren, quoted in Farris, “Nannies,” 96 (my emphasis).

101. Stephen Krason, “The Mondale Act and Its Aftermath: An Overview of Forty
Years of American Law, Public Policy, and Governmental Response to Child Abuse and
Neglect,” excerpt from his edited book, Child Abuse, Family Rights, and the Child Protec-
tive System: A Critical Analysis from Law, Ethics, and Catholic Social Teaching (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 44.
ments in turn themselves become the marionettes of the UN and its

monitoring committee. The entire federalist principle—the original
justification for the US Constitution and government—would become
worthless.102
In the case of the United States, however, ratification would have dra-
matic reverberations throughout the world.
The US is effectively the only country that has not ratified the CRC.
US ratification would have huge implications, not only for the US itself
but globally. This is not simply because of the size and influence of the
US but also because of its unique method of implementing treaties. In
other countries, treaty enforcement is a political matter carried out as
part of a country’s foreign policy but unenforceable by domestic courts,
who generally refrain from involvement in foreign relations.103 The US
makes a treaty, by constitutional stipulation, the “supreme law of the
land,” equal to the Constitution itself. This requires domestic courts to
enforce its provisions automatically, without recourse to international
tribunals.
While the monitoring committee’s role is in theory only “advisory,”
their interpretation of compliance would be authoritative in the US and
effectively bind US courts, government agencies, and parents. Not only
family policy but the relations among family members in the privacy of
their own homes throughout the United States would be dictated by a
UN committee of feminists.
This logic is facilitated by pressure groups invoking the questionable
concept of “customary international law” to incorporate treaty provi-
sions such as the CRC into domestic legal decisions—even where the
treaty has not been ratified. The US Supreme Court has invoked interna-
tional law (when striking down a sodomy law) and the CRC itself. Fed-
eral courts have applied unratified treaties as binding in the United
States. Thus an unratified treaty can be declared the “supreme law of the
land”—equal to the Constitution itself—through nothing more than
the opinions of a legal elite with a vested interested in expanding their
own power.
This expansion of “customary international law” has made it nebu-
lous to the point of nihilism. Originally the concept pertained to a very
limited number of uncontroversial practices. Because no sovereign leg-
islature from which to derive international law existed, jurists aimed to
codify existing “customary,” meaning universal, practice. This pertained
102. For details, see Farris, “Nannies.”

103. Though the Vienna Convention has tried to establish otherwise; Farris, “Nan-
nies,” 90.
to such undisputed matters as diplomatic safe passage and piracy. “For

customary law to emerge . . . there must be uniform universal state
practice . . . for a long time,” Austin Ruse points out. “Customary inter-
national law cannot be established from non-binding documents and
neither can it be established in only 15 years. It takes decades and even
centuries.” Yet in recent years, sexual radicals have tried to accelerate the
process of having their own highly innovative and contentious opinions
ratified as “customary” law, despite the fact that they have provoked
sharp disagreement and have not been practiced for any length of time.
“Proponents of abortion make the case that if the phrase ‘reproductive
health’ is repeated enough times in non-binding UN documents then a
customary international law has been achieved.”104
This turns law into a grab bag for whatever ideological fashion jurists
wish to promote and a formula for pushing aside dissent: no legislature
need enact it; no citizens need approve it; no public need agree to it; no
election need ratify it; no mechanisms must exist to repeal it; no one
can be held responsible for it. No vote is ever held, and no precise word-
ing is ever codified. Nothing more than the momentary opinions of a
judicial clique is necessary to declare as instant “custom” whatever fancy
may take them, and without even having to state precisely what it is, it
immediately becomes “law” throughout the world, even if the vast
majority of humanity has never heard of it, has not approved it, or is
adamantly opposed to it. This is a prescription for arbitrary govern-
ment on a global scale. “Equality of women and men . . . does not only
constitute a crucial treaty obligation, but is also emerging as a principle
of customary international law,” says the CEDAW committee. “All states
can be held accountable for complying with this principle which can be
seen as the cornerstone of all human rights.”105 Does preventing repres-
sive governments from killing political dissidents depend on achieving
an open-ended and probably unrealizable egalitarianism, that is now
“the cornerstone of all human rights” and binding on every human
being in the world? At the least, this constitutes a peculiar understand-
ing of what most of the world has traditionally understood by human
rights.
But the essence of the CRC is its attack on parents. Governments
must override parental decisions when social workers disagree with the
parents’ decisions. Children could seek government review of every
homework assignment or restriction imposed by their parents. Areas of
104. Austin Ruse, “Rulers Without Borders,” Touchstone, January–February 2010 (htt
p://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-01-045-c).
105. CEDAW Committee, quoted in Fagan et al., How the UN Conventions, 7.
jurisdiction now constitutionally forbidden to a government become

subject to mandated government intervention.
A key concept in the CRC gives governments the power to determine
the “best interest of the child.” This sounds unexceptionable. In fact, as
Americans, Britons, and others have already discovered in domestic
family law, the “best interest” standard is highly destructive of parental
and family rights. It allows government officials to decide the “best
interest” of other people’s children, usurping that prerogative from par-
ents, to the point of overriding parental decisions, removing children
from parents who have done nothing legally wrong, and banishing the
parents.106
Traditionally, legal authority over children has long been recognized
to reside with their parents, unless they somehow forfeit it. “For centu-
ries it has been a canon of law that parents speak for their minor chil-
dren,” observed Justice Potter Stewart. “So deeply embedded in our
traditions is this principle of the law that the Constitution itself may
compel a state to respect it.” Parents, not governments, traditionally
decide what is in the best interest of their own children; otherwise, they
are not parents. The Supreme Court has recognized “that natural bonds
of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.”107
This principle has already been all but abolished in American and
British domestic law, largely because of divorce and child-protection
practices, and the CRC is not the only threat to it. Contrary to these
seemingly unequivocal precedents, it is now the norm in American fam-
ily law to assume precisely the opposite: that “the child’s best interest is
perceived as being independent of the parents,” as one practitioner
writes, “and a court review is held to be necessary to protect the child’s
interests.”108
The CRC would put added international pressure on this principle.
As Professor Van Bueren forthrightly reveals:
Best interests provides decision and policy makers with the authority
to substitute their own decisions for either the child’s or the parents’,
providing it is based on considerations of the best interests of the child.
Thus, the Convention challenges the concept that family life is always
in the best interests of children and that parents are always capable of
deciding what is best for children.109
106. Farris, “Nannies”; Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 1.

107. Parham v. J.R., 422 US 584, 602 (1979).
108. Robert Williams, “An Overview of Child Support Guidelines in the United
States,” in Margaret Campbell Haynes (ed.), Child Support Guidelines: The Next Genera-
tion (Washington: Office of Child Support Enforcement, 1994), 2.
109. Quoted in Farris, “Nannies,” 107.
But it does not challenge the substitute presumption that government

intervention in family life is always in the best interests of children and
that government officials are always capable of deciding what is best for
other people’s children. Article 9 permits government functionaries to
remove children from their parents not on the basis of proven abuse or
neglect by the parents but on their simple judgement that it is in “the
best interests of the child.”
Noteworthy is that most cases eroding parental rights in domestic law
are divorce cases. Noting that the best interest “standard also applies in
divorce cases on the presumption that the family unit has been broken,”
Michael Farris observes, “If this treaty becomes binding, all parents
would have the same legal status as abusive parents, because the govern-
ment would have the right to override every parental decision if it
deemed the parent’s choice contrary to the child’s best interest.”110 This
is precisely the status divorced parents now have, abusive or not. Non-
abusive parents in intact marriages who think they and their children
are safe from government intervention are burying their heads.
A connected provision requires the “child’s right of participation.”
Article 12 stipulates that signatory governments “shall assure to the child
who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express
those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child
being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the
child.” Against whom must governments enforce this right of children
to express whatever opinions occur to them? This essentially institu-
tionalizes the right of children to rebel against their parents and puts the
state on the side of the child, with the backing of international law. “The
Children’s Convention potentially protects the rights of the child who
philosophically disagrees with the parents’ educational goals,” writes
Van Bueren.111 What is the difference from a child who (philosophi-
cally) simply does not wish to do his homework?
A striking irony is the claimed protection of children’s “privacy.” Arti-
cle 16 provides that “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful
interference with his or her privacy, family, home, or correspondence”
and “the child has the right to the protection of the law against such
interference or attacks.” But again, protection from whom? His or her
parents? Authorizing state officials to “protect” this “privacy” justifies
massive state intervention into the family’s privacy.
All these provisions might sound innocuous if their purpose was to
110. Michael Farris, “Parental Rights: Why Now is the Time to Act,” The Home School
Court Report, vol. 22, no. 2 (March–April 2006).
111. Quoted in Farris, “Nannies,” 108.
protect adults against government repression. When applied to chil-

dren, they have the effect of abolishing parents and all authority
between children and the state. This starkly illustrates how the family is
essential to freedom, and how the state, when it claims to be protecting
“rights” and “freedom” and “privacy”—without the mediating author-
ity of the family—is the fox protecting the henhouse.
These provisions allow government officials to pose as the mouth-
pieces and defenders of other people’s children, children they do not
know and do not love. Yet the altruism of these functionaries is assumed
without question, while parents are depicted as selfishly promoting
their own interests, which are cast as contrary to those of their own chil-
dren. This makes the child the pawn of various adult manipulators, as
revealed clearly by one law school professor:
The interests of the child should be at the center of any decision-mak-
ing. If the child is capable of articulating a perspective, the child should
have client-directed counsel to get that voice before the court and the
court should seriously consider it. Even if the child is unable to articu-
late a view, the child’s attorney can offer a child-focused assessment of
the child’s needs. Because the child’s best interests may be different
than one or both of the parent’s interests, the child should have a voice.
What is described as “the child’s” voice comes out of the mouth of a
lawyer or some other official. Parents are left with no greater authority
over their own children than that of another “voice” that officials may
heed or ignore as they please. According to another law professor: “Giv-
ing the child a voice, however, does not necessarily ‘conflict.’ Listening
to the child does not mean not listening to the parents or others
involved in the dispute. The key is to add the child’s voice to the voice of
others being presented.”112
Parents and children are equal voices—essentially they are made lob-
byists for their own private lives—but it is the officials who decide.
Indeed, it is difficult to see how the CRC has any purpose other than
to abolish parenthood, effectively abolishing the family. “No criticism
was leveled against either Ireland or the UK for failing to consider the
child’s viewpoint in those cases where the parents allowed their child to
attend sex education classes,” writes Farris. “Nor was there any criticism
for failure to consider the child’s views in the decision to enroll the child
in the government schools.” Farris concludes that “The child’s wishes
ppp
112. Linda Elrod, “Client-Directed Lawyers for Children: It is the ‘Right’ Thing to
Do,” Pace Law Review 27 (Summer 2007), 869, 882–83, quoted in Farris, “Nannies,” 111.

SexPolitics 5 (3215)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SexPolitics 5 (3215)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

SexPolitics 5 (3215)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

IV

Globalizing Sex—and Sexual Power

“Why is the West so obsessed with sex?”

SEXUAL POLITICS is now worldwide, and radical sexual ideology is

strongholds whose policies undermine families and other traditional

Sex and the International Regime

5. Presidential Memorandum—International Initiatives to Advance the Human

Strangely, the Obama administration seemed to make “LGBT” issues

cated more than $30 million to frontline advocates in 80 countries. In

10. White House Fact Sheet.

Here too, the US government would finance pressure groups in other

The European Union

15. Ibid., 52.

views on abortion,” NEWR laments, “and the relatively liberal abortion

20. Golubiewski, Europe’s Social Agenda, 45.

lies, churches, and local community groups—all reminiscent of their

23. Ibid., 49–50.

alleged discriminators; instead, the burden falls on the accused—who

24. Sophia Kuby, “‘Principle of Equality’ to Overrule Fundamental Freedoms,” Euro-

29. Information and Action Pack, 5.

person of another faith could also be interpreted as harassment.” Reli-

35. See chapter IV, under “Islamism as a Sexual Ideology.”

The United Nations

37. Information and Action Pack, 5.

der” in the UN system, according to feminists who insist it is not

40. Jacqui True, “Mainstreaming Gender in International Institutions,” in Laura

invited to official meetings from which their opponents are excluded.

larger criticism shows once again how feminist politics, particularly in

50. Slater, Stand, 2 note 4.

53. Balmforth, “Hijacking Human Rights.”

discriminated against, and how does UNICEF address this discrimina-

55. Silva, United Nations Children’s Fund, 1, 6–7, 68, 9.

58. Ibid., 81, 76, 79, 86.

Human Rights: Still More Gender Crimes

to the original understanding of the term. In the name of human rights,

redistribution, a task with which, despite the vision of human rights,

67. Geraldine Van Bueren, “Combating Child Poverty—Human Rights Approaches,”

This openly acknowledges that feminists have politicized human

theory, of theories of the family, and of the relationship between the

75. Bahar, “Human Rights,” 107.

Some provisions of these early treaties do appear self-contradictory.

Women’s Human Rights

ing to Christina Hoff Sommers.81 “The UN monitoring committee rou-

85. Fagan et al., How UN Conventions, 23.

individuals.” Collectivized child-rearing seems to be the committee’s

88. Ibid., 11–12 (emphasis added).

The movement is not only generating new interpretations of existing

91. Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Reinventing International Law: Women’s Rights as

choices: “What government measures have been put in place to change

92. Quoted in ibid., 7.

vise adherence. CEDAW mandates programs and policies that Ameri-

Children’s Human Rights

94. Quoted in ibid., 5.

The movement declares itself to be more interested in the welfare of

98. Schlafly, Who Killed, 205.

100. Van Bueren, quoted in Farris, “Nannies,” 96 (my emphasis).

ments in turn themselves become the marionettes of the UN and its

102. For details, see Farris, “Nannies.”

to such undisputed matters as diplomatic safe passage and piracy. “For