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U.N. feminist policies undermining traditional families, analyst says


WASHINGTON (BP)–United Nations-sponsored committees are pushing an agenda that counters traditional, moral and social norms regarding the family and religion, Patrick Fagan, a Heritage Foundation expert on family and culture said Feb. 27 at the Washington think tank, CNSNews.com reported.

Some feminist policies being pushed through the U.N. High Commissioner’s Office for Human Rights are so radical they violate the U.N.’s own founding documents and undermine nations’ rights to determine their domestic policies, Fagan said, predicting that the next decade will witness a confrontation between traditional cultures and new rights.

As human rights laws are changed to meet the demands of the international women’s movement, “‘the movement is not only generating new interpretations of existing human rights doctrine, but is also generating new rights,'” Fagan quoted from a recent speech by a senior U.N. official.

“‘The most controversial is the issue of sexual rights,'” Fagan quoted the official as saying.

U.N. agencies are seeking to reconstruct social norms by redefining gender as a social construct and not a biological distinction, Fagan said. The United Nations also is rewriting school textbooks to promote the new definition of gender, and fighting traditional sex roles.

The international women’s movement is setting itself up “as the new universal moral arbiter of all laws, of all religions, of all cultures and of all nations,” Fagan said.

The United Nations is following the route of many totalitarian governments that gained control over populations by attacking two of society’s most vulnerable institutions — the family and the local church, Fagan said.

Countries that have constitutional bans on abortion are regarded by the U.N. High Commissioner’s Office for Human Rights to be in violation of the rights of women, according to the moral doctrine of the international feminist movement, Fagan noted.

In recent years, the United Nations has urged countries to put in place legal structures that would allow children to take their parents to court when they disagree about the content of sex education. U.N. agencies also seek to give prostitutes the legal rights afforded other professions and have criticized conscientious objection clauses in laws for doctors who oppose abortion.

In many cases, social policy officials on U.N. committees advise nations to decrease the emphasis on marriage, parental authority and religious beliefs. Mothers are encouraged to enter the workforce, and legal restraints on sexual activity among adolescents are targeted for removal.

Max Padilla, a former minister of the family in Nicaragua, displayed evidence that United Nations agencies distributed literature in Nicaraguan schools that promoted anal and oral sex.

Padilla was fired from his job as head of the Nicaraguan Ministry of the Family in June 2000 for ignoring the demands of U.N. agencies which insisted that Nicaragua change its definition of gender from “male and female” to no more than a “social construct.”

The new definition would have allowed for homosexual and transgender behavior, Padilla said. When development agencies from Norway, Sweden, Germany and other countries threatened the Nicaraguan government with the withholding of aid, the government fired Padilla and changed its definition of gender.

Fagan said he was not conducting a jihad against the United Nations. “There’s a lot of good done at the United Nations,” he said. “And in the modern world of global economies, digital communications, massive quick travel, there is no way we can’t have a United Nations or some other body in its place.”

Fagan warned against scapegoating the United Nations. “Within Congress, we have the very same distortions,” he said. “The more I looked at what’s happening at the U.N., the more I began to realize that the issues are much further advanced on these very policies right up here half a mile from where I’m standing. The policies that are being proposed in the U.N. are law and massively funded right here in the United States Congress.”
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Morahan is a senior writer with CNSNews.com. Used by permission.

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  • Lawrence Morahan