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May 5,
2002
By
George Archibald
THE
WASHINGTON TIMES
NEW YORK — More than 300
leaders of pro-family groups pleaded with diplomats at the
United Nations yesterday to reaffirm marriage and promote
sexual abstinence among teen-agers.
The U.N. practice of
providing millions of condoms to sexually active youth and
adults in Africa was sharply criticized by Janet K. Museveni,
first lady of Uganda, who said the world body should instead
be promoting sexual abstinence to attack the HIV and AIDS
"pandemic" ravaging the continent.
"The young person who has
trained to be disciplined will, in the final analysis, survive
better than the one who has been instructed to wear a piece of
rubber and continue with 'business as usual,'" Mrs.
Museveni told a World Congress of Families meeting on the eve
of the General Assembly's Special Session on Children, which
formally begins Wednesday.
"When we fail to tell our
children that there are limitations to human freedom, for
example, that there can be no freedom to hurt another human
being; when we fail to teach our young that there are some
moral absolutes and they must reckon with them or perish, then
we do grievous harm to the future of the human race,"
said the wife of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
Mr. Museveni's response to
Uganda's HIV and AIDS crisis in the war-ravaged nation in 1986
was not "to keep quiet because of other considerations
such as our tourism trade and image," but to "speak
out and sound an alarm in order to save lives," the first
lady said.
The country's aggressive
abstinence campaign, particularly among the youth, has reduced
the rate of new HIV infections by two-thirds in from 1995 to
2000, she said.
"Those that practice
abstinence are free to become positive contributors to society
because they don't have to worry about illegitimate
pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, or broken
marriages," said Sharon Slater, head of the Arizona-based
United Families International and an organizer of the New York
conference.
Mrs. Slater pleaded with U.N.
diplomats from more than 50 countries "to ensure that
religions are respected and protected in U.N. documents,
insofar as they respect the family and the dignity of the
human person."
Wade F. Horn, President Bush's
assistant secretary for children and families at the
Department of Health and Human Services, said the United
Nations should reaffirm marriage and sexual fidelity because
"government ought to make it clear that government is in
the business of promoting healthy marriages because it is an
effective strategy for improving the well-being of
children."
About three-fourths of children
without fathers in the home will experience poverty before age
11, compared with 20 percent in two-parent families, he said.
Last week, in celebration of
National Family Week, Mr. Bush said, "Many one-parent
families are also a source of comfort and reassurance, yet a
family with a mom and dad who are committed to marriage and
devote themselves to their children helps provide children a
sound foundation for success."
Mr. Horn rejected the argument
that government should be neutral on marriage in the same
sense that it "has no business promoting one flavor of
ice cream over another."
"Government is not neutral
about a lot of things — like home ownership or charitable
giving — precisely because it can be shown that home
ownership and charitable giving contribute to the common
good," he said.
Conference participants sharply
criticized efforts of feminist groups to introduce
"sexual rights," including the right to abortion,
for children and teen-agers into a U.N. declaration being
drafted for the U.N. Child Summit.
Richard G. Wilkins, a law
professor and director of the World Family Policy Center at
Brigham Young University, said access to "abortion on
demand" is being required of countries by the U.N.
committee that enforces the Convention on the Elimination of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
The child summit declaration
this week will ask all countries to ratify the CEDAW; the
United States has not done so.
"The CEDAW committee
routinely criticizes governments for limiting abortion —
even though abortion is nowhere mentioned as a right in the
convention itself," Mr. Wilkins said. "The committee
also labels motherhood as a mere 'stereotype' that holds women
back."
"When countries have
attempted to follow the admonition in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that motherhood and the
correlative right of childbearing deserve special protection
and care, the CEDAW committee has complained that these
efforts are 'paternalistic' or — even worse — that
encouraging motherhood discourages women from seeking greater
fulfillment in paid work," he said.
To the contrary, said Allan
Carlson, director of the Howard Center for Family, Religion
and Society in Rockford, Ill., "governments should take
all reasonable steps to treat motherhood as the most important
of vocations and to ensure that the mother-child bond is given
priority over short-term economic needs."
Because of the United States'
high divorce and abortion rates, "America has become the
most dangerous country in the world into which a child is born
— the richest and the most dangerous," said Patrick
Fagan, director of child and family studies at the Heritage
Foundation.
Only 28 percent of children in
the United States make it to age 11 in an intact home with
both a mother and father, he said.
Feminism and sexual promiscuity
have caused "massive alienation of the sexes," Mr.
Fagan said. "The sexual has gone chaotic and at the
center of the sexual is the child. The child has been
rejected."
In European countries, high
abortion rates and decisions by numerous couples not to marry
and have children will reduce their populations 97 percent in
four to five generations, Mr. Fagan said.
"That is sexual suicide.
And that is what the United Nations wants to bring onto the
world. That is psychotic. It is suicidal," he said.
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