Lies, Damned Lies, and UN Meetings

Some years ago the UN representative of the Girl Scouts claimed her human rights had been violated when her picture was taken at a public meeting. The UN has a tendency to make everyone a bit crazy but most especially crusty feminists. Once one of them proclaimed that the UN was a safe space for her until the religious right showed up.

This past week a UN functionary told a roomful of UN delegates, “The sexual behavior of men can be a form of violence against women because it can result in pregnancy.” Presumably well-condomed sex tends not toward violence.

Six thousand radical feminists were accredited to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) over these past two weeks. From the four-corners of the Earth they came to demand their rights, at least on opening day and then most of them hit the streets for sightseeing and shopping.

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The crustiest of them did not wander from UN property but stayed and brayed, quite often at the Holy See and the “Unholy Alliance” of governments who resisted the unattractive turn of their aging ideologies.

The purpose of the meeting is to write a document that is later “ratified” by the UN General Assembly. The documents are non-binding aspirational documents that have no force in law but are used as cudgels against recalcitrant states.

The amount of money spent on such conferences is astronomical, more than six thousand airfares, and roughly 60,000 hotel nights over a two-week meeting at New York rates and you are talking about real money, upwards of $15 million, and this does not include what governments spent to send delegates from the capitols. And it’s really wasted money, too. At the same meeting last year, so profound were the differences, they didn’t even produce a document. As of this writing they may not produce on this year either.

The Commission this year is supposed to produce a document on violence against women but how do you produce one that makes any kind of real-world sense when participants from the UN believe coitus that results in pregnancy is a form of violence against women?

The radicals are being led by the United States and the European Union. They want language in the document about comprehensive sexuality education. Note that word “sexuality.” It’s not about sex; it’s about sexuality. This is far beyond the gynecological drawing you got in that little blue book in the seventh grade.

The radicals have taken to the press to complain that the Holy See, Iran and Russia are blocking progress.  These are the bogeymen repeated endlessly in the global media. The New York Times editorialized a few days ago that it is well known that the Holy See and Iran want to control women. Reuters reported yesterday morning, “An ‘unholy alliance’ of Iran, Russia, the Vatican and others is threatening to derail a U.N. declaration urging an end to violence against women and girls by objecting to language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights.”

Read these reports backwards and you can see what’s really going on. The document is under stress and may never be released because the US and the EU are insisting on ideas and language that many delegations find objectionable and if they would only produce a less radical document, there would be happy agreement all around. The draft documents under considerations are not written by the Unholy Alliance. The UN bureaucracy in cahoots with the US and the EU writes them. All the Unholy Alliance can do is react.

Certainly conservative governments can try to amend the radicalism out or try to assuage the damage. The African Group has been trying to get sovereignty language into the document, which means they are able to resist western lawyers waiving the document like a cudgel against their traditional beliefs.

Conservative governments had the temerity to introduce language directly from the Universal Declaration of Human rights about “life, liberty and security of persons.” The US and the EU are blocking it.

Crazy statistics are repeated endlessly at this meeting and then spit out as if by rote by the leftwing press. One of the crustiest feminists is Adrienne Germaine, a member of the official US delegation and President Emeritus of the International Women’s Health Coalition who repeated the ancient and discredited claim that more women suffer from domestic violence than who die from cancer, war, and malaria combined. The global media dutifully lapped this with nary a whiff of skepticism or research even.

Possibly the worst claim made by the US/EU is that the Unholy Alliance wants to hide behind traditional religious beliefs to protect wife beaters.

Most UN documents take into account the religious beliefs and customs of the countries called upon the implement the document’s aspirations. That is, after all, one of the tenets of multiculturalism, except when it isn’t, except when the gender ideology comes into play. The Unholy Alliance and their allies around the world want the document to be implemented taking these things into consideration. To the radicals, this can only mean men are encouraged to beat their wives with the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon.

One woman told Reuters if the CSW fails once more to produce a document that will be the end of the CSW.  Well there is no chance of that.

There is a UN Charter Body called the Trusteeship Council, which was formed to help trust territories come to independence after the Second World War. The final trust territory to gain independence was tiny Palau in 1994. The Trusteeship Council continued to meet for many years and even now they are searching for a new mandate. No way UN bodies ever go out of business.

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