WHAT EFFECT HAVE UNITED NATIONS ACTIONS HAD ON THE FAMILY?

By Elizabeth Holmes

I will begin with a brief outline of the background against which it is suggested the UN’s actions are best understood, then provide a "snapshot" of Ireland that shows how the UN agenda in action there is undermining the family. The strategy for thus achieving the UN’s objectives will be shown to work initially through education, then through social policy, and finally through constitutional change.

The background against which it is suggested the UN’s actions are best understood

From its beginnings, the United Nations was directed toward the achievement of a new world order. Its initial member states committed themselves to protecting the individual’s human rights, while the UN’s founders placed their faith in the progress that would follow the development and application of both the natural and the social sciences globally. Such progress, they believed, would banish war and want forever, thus ushering in the new order.

For many of the UN’s early leaders, changing human nature was at the core of their task. Sir Julian Huxley, a founder and head of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—the intellectual arm of UN—said that education must be used to get people to accept "the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization." He continued, "We must reeducate him, convert him . . . into a true citizen of the world."

Torres Bodet, one of his successors, talked of how war must be destroyed in its most secret stronghold: the human heart. "Modern humanism," he said, "must know no limits or frontiers. It is UNESCO’s supreme task to bring this new type of humanism to birth." Dr. Brock Chisholm, a founder of World Health Organization (WHO) and its director general from 1948 to 1953, claimed that war is a consistent behaviour pattern of man, and, he asserted, "the responsibility for . . . charting the necessary changes in human behaviour rests clearly on the scientists’ working in that field." Rene Maheu, the man who "was UNESCO," called for an internal transformation of both man and society when in 1970 he addressed an international audience of educators, because, he asserted, "we are at the beginning of what will no doubt be a long and complex process of radical educational revision which will pave the way for the invention of a new human model: a process from which societies and individuals will emerge transformed."

As we fast forward 50 years or so to the present, the UN’s leaders are claiming that already member states have reached a consensus on the plan for global-scale "sustainable development" and that we are now in the action phase. Ignoring all dissenting voices (and now there are many), this "consensus" is a composite of the commitments made by member states at the recent serious of high-profile conferences in Rio (environment), Cairo (population), Vienna (human rights), Copenhagen (social contract), Beijing (women), Istanbul (partnership with "civil society"), and Rome (food security).

The overall objective of "sustainable development" is probably best described as a healthy ecological system, with human beings regarded generally as being continuous with or an extension of the biosphere. Reaching for this utopian dream demands the internationally controlled management of the planet; the reordering of all our varied economic, social, and political systems; and the reforming or reconstructing of the very ways we relate to one and other as men, women, and children.

At this stage, I would like to pause in order to make two points: (1) however critical we are of the United Nations, we must always be aware that an authoritative international arena—where grievances can be heard, conflicts diffused, and justice supported—is important, and (2) while it is not the concern here to unearth conspiracies, it is useful to single out one particularly powerful interest group which we have allowed to use the international stage so effectively that its agenda has been and is the pivot or the axis around which much of the UN’s plans turn. This is the lobby committed to the control of population growth globally. Once this piece of the jigsaw is in place, we can, for instance, begin to understand why the UN has given responsibility for social development globally to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNPFA) and why achieving "sustainable development" touches even our most intimate relationships: the familial.

A snapshot, as it were, of Ireland that shows the UN’s agenda in action there undermining the family

Ireland, a Christian, mainly Catholic country that became a member of the UN in 1955, is a poignant example of how dramatically and rapidly a way of life can be changed as it is brought into conformity with this plan.

The hundreds of people, many of them women, who in 1994 were invited to celebrate the launching of the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) heard the minister of Social Welfare make a short speech. They then enjoyed a generous lunch in the beautiful surroundings of the newly restored Dublin Castle. But it is the short speech rather than the menu that must interest us here. One-third of government revenue is spent on social welfare, and its minister was proud to announce that his department has embraced the UN definition of the family, with which you are all by now familiar:

Any combination of two or more persons who are bound together by ties of mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement and who, together, assume responsibility for, inter alia, the care and maintenance of group members, the addition of new members through procreation or adoption, the socialization of children, and the social control of members.

The minister ended his speech that day by handing over a generous cheque to the steering committee to help them promote themes such as "the recognition, support, and empowerment of diverse family forms." While the Holy See delegation to the UN has unequivocally opposed this negation of the family, the Irish IYF steering committee comprised at least three prominent Catholic groups, and its preparatory meetings took place in a Catholic convent and were chaired by a Catholic nun.

How the government is currently taking steps toward neutralizing those articles in the Irish Constitution, which are unequivocal in their support of the family based on marriage between a man and a women, will be discussed below.

As a portent of things to come, the woman who is head of WHO’s Reproductive Health Division recently took this redefinition to its logical conclusion. In identifying their target group as young people and the family, Dr. Tomris Turman said, "Family for me means ‘an extended environment where decisions about health are taken.’"

In Ireland, the UN strategy for thus achieving its objectives will be shown as working through education initially, then through social policy, and finally through constitutional change

We will look briefly at how during the 1960s and 1970s it was the UN’s strategy to use the educational system to condition us into acceptance of a different way of life. The changed consciousness that began to emerge then led to new demands, and we will then see how during the 1980s and 1990s, social policy was adjusted and adapted to fit these. It is often us women, separated out as a oppressed category suffering from discrimination, who are the carriers for these demands. The Irish Constitution is now threatened with being unpicked as amendments are called for to ensure both the legality of these policies and the integration of the new UN human rights agenda.

Education

To help us get our bearing on education in Ireland, it is useful to know that educational historian Coolahan noted that before the end of 19th century there was a very high rate of literacy in Ireland. This was largely thanks to the commitment and generosity of the religious orders. A Jesuit priest once explained to me how before the launch of free education in 1960s, you could send your child to an ordinary secondary (12 to 18 years) school for what it would cost for a man, at the time, to buy a packet of cigarettes, to the top schools for the price of a packet of cigarettes a day.

For deciphering the UN’s orientation on education, we might look to the claim of UNESCO’s head, Frederico Mayor, that the "most important challenge [facing his organization] is to substantially reduce demographic growth through education." He went on to emphasize how in using education to control population, there is a need for partnerships with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and UNPFA.

We need to know also how back in 1946 the meaning of the word health was redefined in WHO’s constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity." Everyone, its constitution asserts, has a right to such health. This all-embracing redefinition opened the way for WHO to work in tandem with UNESCO in promoting what they judge as "healthy" lifestyles, and they do this by tapping into the huge resources that modern welfare states spend on health and education.

So it was that when in 1946 the International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva reconvened its influential annual conferences after the war, these two UN agencies were involved in its immediate recommendation that a new form of "health education" should be introduced into schools at all levels throughout the world. It was thus that social and health education programmes were launched. These programmes (and they appear under myriad titles), according to one of their current manuals, are aimed at "the social, mental and spiritual development of the child, as an individual and as a member of society in the communal and global sense."

Note how the family is overlooked in this programme, which has been developed in close collaboration with and with the guidance and advice of both health and education services.

These programmes would bring into play the powerful psychological techniques that use the group setting to achieve attitudinal and behavioural change. In the decades that followed, they would be used to tune our children and their teachers into the required global mind set.

Of course, neither WHO nor UNESCO has the power to force a country to change, but alongside the moral status and prestige that attaches to the UN in Ireland, there were perhaps other persuasive factors in action. The enormous improvement of educational facilities that took place in Ireland in the 1970s was partly financed through the World Bank and the Educational Financing Division of UNESCO in 1969 through 1970, for instance, assisting borrowers in preparing 80% of the bank’s educational projects.

Ireland became an enthusiastic participant in a world educational community that provided the institutional basis for re-forming education as a tool for engineering social change. Our schools, with the access they provide to teachers and to a captive and malleable audience, have now become a focal point for conditioning us into acceptance of an internationalist agenda.

A cultural revolution was thus set in train that has eased the way for the uprooting of those Christian principles that have, up to now, served as the basis for our communal life.

Social Policy

"We have the best organized institutional movement of women in Europe; it constitutes a state within a state, and the state is convulsed with us inside it," wrote one prominent Irish university-level educator. The fruits of this are apparent as women’s/gender/equality studies programmes proliferate at all levels of education and we are deluged with bullying demands for everything from state-run day care to the mandatory involvement of men in domestic chores.

In accord with the evolution of UN’s agenda, the basis of social policy is shifting from "women’s liberation" through "gender equality," and we are now entering the phase of integrating "role interchangeability."

Initially the population lobby was forced to work covertly through the UN. In the words of Brock Chisholm, from WHO, this was mainly due to pressure from "one sect of one religion." It is interesting to note that it was feminist writer Germaine Greer who documented the kind of massive campaign that was then successfully launched in the U.S. to achieve public acceptance of the idea that the world was overpopulated. By 1967, UNPFA was established to finance and expand UN population programmes, and by 1974 in Bucharest the UN was seeking agreement to a World Plan of Action to control population growth.

Changing the lives of women is a key element in the strategy for reducing population, and in Mexico the following year the blueprint of the UN’s agenda for undermining the family was spelled out in another World Plan of Action, this time on equality for women. This ambitious programme, designed to "liberate" women from the home, demanded appropriate legislation and policy to protect "all the various forms of the family, including the nuclear family, . . . consensual unions, and the single-parent family"; and it demanded that the state assume responsibility for providing children with adequate care. So comprehensive is its approach that even how homes should be redesigned to minimise their maintenance is specified. This declaration is reinforced through "The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women," which is legally binding on all countries, such as Ireland, who have ratified it.

Councils for the status of women were set up in countries throughout the world to ensure that governments meet these requirements. In Ireland the council, which purported to be representative of all Irishwomen, was given direct access to the office of the Taoiseach, our "prime minister." Commissions on women and their bulky and expensively produced reports have followed hot on the heels of one another, each demanding and receiving an ever widening range of government-funded services. An ambitious programme of legislative change has now been pushed through.

The effectiveness of the UN’s anti-family agenda becomes more and more apparent as labour force surveys in Ireland show a huge increase of housewives working outside the home. The dramatic fall in the birth rate since the 1980s has been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in the number of babies born outside marriage.

Meanwhile, Ireland became a model UN member state as our elected head of state, President Mary Robinson—a strong and vocal UN supporter—was a contender for the recently filled post of secretary general. She is currently canvassing, with the declared support of U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, for the position of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Constitutional Change

We have become party to all the major European and UN human rights conventions, and in conscientiously meeting our obligations under these legally binding treaties, Ireland has been a model state. Our Department of Foreign Affairs now has a separate section dealing with human rights issues.

The government has also appointed two expert groups: the first to make recommendations on changing our constitution, and the second a commission on the family. These two bodies are, almost in concert, proposing changes to these specific articles that stand in the way of the UN’s proposals.In summarising the 654-plus-page final report of the Constitution Review Group to government, the Irish Times (15 June 1996) carried the headline "Constitution review body wants widened definition of family." For a relevant discussion of the role of the Irish media in facilitating this cultural revolution, see D. Fennell’s (1993) Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press. In addition, a majority of the review group on the constitution is in favour of inserting the following specific clause: "Ireland, as a member of the United Nations, confirms its determination to comply with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations."

The drive to undermine the family as the basic unit of society is now spilling over as our children, increasingly indoctrinated about their rights at school, are being separated out as yet another category who have suffered discrimination. The Irish Constitution explicitly protects the relationship between parents and their children from the power of the state, and yet the government has ratified the UN Convention on Children’s Rights (CRC). This convention, in the words of the UN publications’ catalogue, asserts "a new concept of separate rights for children, with the government accepting responsibility for protecting children from the power of parents."

The UN, as already noted, has no mandate to police sovereign nation states in order to ensure implementation of its agenda, so part of the strategy lies in reorienting separate national legal systems in all their diversity into this human rights framework. Such rights, codified into legally binding conventions, are being used as a kind of constitutional basis for the single-world order that has been the objective of the UN system since its inception.

Enforcement of the legal obligations that such rights entail is supported directly through UN monitoring bodies and through regional machinery such as the Court of Human Rights of the Council of Europe. Ireland cooperates fully with UN monitoring bodies, presenting comprehensive reports and reviews.

The report of the attorney general—the chief government legal officer—to such a monitoring committee on our progress in implementing the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights reveals how, by ratifying it, the government had submitted the people to accepting divorce, despite the 63% majority who rejected it in a referendum on whether or not to amend the constitution on this issue in 1986. Intensive government activity, which included preparing legislation and carrying out information campaigns, preceded the recent rerun of that referendum, which reversed the 63% majority, but only by a hairsbreadth. Reports such as this provide an insight into how effectively the UN’s human-rights based constitution leads to the marginalizing of national constitutions and into how human rights are being used to overreach the democratic process.

Meeting the demands of this UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights also necessitates the kind of equality legislation that is, at this very moment, making it extremely unlikely that even the Catholic Church will be able to refuse teaching posts in their schools to active homosexuals.

One of the factors, then, underlying the current willingness to commit resources to altering our constitution is that the government has ratified legally binding UN human-rights-conventions elements that are incompatible with that constitution. Such alterations are also necessary to ensure the legality of many of the new social policies already introduced to meet our obligations under the agenda generated within the UN. Directed from the UN, the world is being integrated into the universal culture of human rights.

I will end by recalling how in 1983 a huge majority of Irish people voted to include in our constitution an article giving explicit protection to unborn children. This constitutional protection is now buckling under enormous pressure against the background of the concerted efforts that are being made through the UN to establish access to "reproductive health" (which includes abortion) as a human right. Gwen Landholt reports on the drafting of another UN "consensus" document: the World Food Summit Plan of Action. The spokesperson for the EU was an individual from Ireland, and "it was galling indeed," she writes, "to listen to someone from so-called Catholic Ireland relentlessly pushing anti-life policies."

Ireland is a small country with an internationalist president who is calling for a strengthening of the UN system and a government speaking of a place for us on the UN Security Council. As a people whose moral standing in the world is high, we are allowing ourselves to be used as a standard bearer for the new global order that, with its secular inspired ethic, is destroying the family.

Elizabeth Holmes holds an advanced degree in sociology and is a former employee of Sheed and Ward Publishers in London. She is a founding member of the Education Forum of Ireland and a member of the education committee of the Public Policy Institute of Ireland. She also serves on the editorial board of the Brandsma Review. She has devoted recent years to researching the influence of nongovernmental organizations on social policy.