| Pact called vital
global tool that may sway U.N. By Carrie A. Moore
Deseret
News religion editor
GENEVA — As scores of Utahns
return home from the World Congress of Families
II held here last week, they have plenty of
reason for celebration.
After years of finding
themselves in the vast minority at international
meetings designed to guide U.N. policymaking, the
pro-family advocates see their new "Geneva
Declaration" — affirmed by more than
1,500 congress participants here — as an
important new tool they can use in their efforts
to defend traditional family values.
The document marks the first
time a large number of pro-family,
non-governmental organizations — known as
NGOs — have banded together to formulate a
document that defines the traditional family and
other family issues in a way they all support,
said Allan Carlson, director of the Howard Center
for Family, Religion and Society.
Chartered NGOs are basically
special interest groups that have lobbying access
to the United Nations. They are thus in a
position to affect international policymaking by
U.N. delegates — much as lobbyists at the
Utah Legislature talk with legislators — to
formulate and affect the wording of bills being
considered for passage.
And language — the
specific wording used to formulate U.N.
resolutions — is the ultimate source of
power when international policies are formulated.
Because there is strength in
numbers, the 256 NGOs and other pro-family
organizations that attended — and apparently
approved — the Geneva Declaration give the
document credibility on the world stage. (A voice
vote to affirm the document was unanimous.
Results from actual balloting will be tallied
this week.)
"During the past
decade, pro-family and pro-life NGOs have had
good reason to be discouraged by many documents
created at U.N. conferences," said Richard
Wilkins, general secretariat of the World
Congress and executive director of NGO Family
Voice, also known as the World Family Policy
Center at Brigham Young University.
The BYU group was formed
about two years ago out of concern over the
direction of U.N. policymaking.
Scholars, academics and
religious leaders at the World Congress referred
repeatedly to the proliferation in the past 25
years of NGOs funded by what they said are
powerful anti-family forces — including
feminist, pro-abortion and gay and lesbian groups
— that have made great strides in lobbying
the United Nations to insert language favorable
to their causes into international treaties and
conferences.
"In some documents, the
fundamental concepts of 'life,' 'parents' and
'family' became contentious battlefields,"
Wilkins said. "In the midst of this
struggle, NGOs defending 'life' and 'family' are
often unaware of language in (many past) U.N.
documents that supports both respect for human
life and the centrality of the human
family."
Congress presenters referred
particularly to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. General
Assembly in 1948 — long before attempts to
legalize abortion, same-sex marriage and
euthanasia were spawned beginning in the 1960s.
Article 16 of that document specifies that
"men and women . . . have the right to marry
and to found a family," which is "the
natural and fundamental group unit of society and
is entitled to protection by society and the
state."
While early U.N. treaties
and conferences stood on this
"family-friendly" foundation, in recent
years, anti-family forces have dominated U.N.
policymaking, said Gwendolyn Landolt, national
vice president of REAL Women of Canada.
She told congress
participants that in recent years, "the U.N.
has turned its guns on the family unit in order
to break its strength and power — (which is)
passing on cultural and religious values from
generation to generation — values which the
U.N. now deems subversive to its activist agenda,
and therefore, dangerous for the future of the
world."
Landolt blamed the
"intolerance by the U.N. to traditional
values" on "the alarm of Western
nations and Japan regarding the population growth
of the developing world," which they have
viewed "as a threat to (their) global
domination."
In his speech to the
congress, Elder Bruce Hafen of The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' First Quorum
of the Seventy, affirmed Landolt's
characterization of how anti-family activists
have used the U.N. forum to advance their agenda.
Because many new democracies
don't have legal precedents on which to base new
legislation, they often turn to U.N. policy to
craft their own legal base. U.S. appellate courts
and the U.S. Supreme Court also at times use U.N.
policy in creating legal precedent.
Wilkins said while such
issues may seem a distant threat to many Utahns,
the Utah Supreme Court cited a U.N. document in a
ruling it made last month because no legal
precedent existed on which to base its ruling.
International policymaking
also cuts the other way as well.
For example, there is
concern by pro-family activists that as more
Western nations legalize same-sex unions —
as France just recently did — anti-family
groups will use that precedent to push for
language recognizing such unions as legal
entities in U.N. documents. That would, in turn,
give law-making bodies and judges in individual
nations a precedent to cite in ruling on the
issue.
New policymaking isn't the
only concern, Landolt said.
"Even though earlier
U.N. treaties did not include provisions for
abortion, contraception, sterilization,
homosexual and adolescent rights, the (10-member)
'treaty committees' (selected by U.N. member
states via secret ballot) now 'reinterpret' them
so as to include such provisions."
Such committees "are
now releasing 'criticisms' of government failures
to implement this new agenda" so
"contact each country's media and
sympathetic NGOs in order that the latter may
lobby their governments to 'correct' the problems
identified by the committee."
Elder Hafen sees the same
disdain at the U.N. level in relation to the role
of women, motherhood and even religion itself.
While many nations seek to
protect motherhood as intended by the United
Nations' original Declaration on Human Rights,
"today's U.N. committee regards these
protections as 'paternalistic,' reinforcing an
outdated concept of motherhood that holds women
back 'from seeking greater fulfillment in paid
work.' The committee also opposes interpretations
of women's identity that derive from a country's
'internal religious rules and customs.'
"Thus the committee
requires religious cultures to reinterpret sacred
texts in the light of U.N. mandates. This stance
presumes that religious liberty is no longer a
human right."
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