Family Values Go Global
FEDER, DON
Family Values Go Global Pro-family advocates gather in Geneva to plot the good fight. BY DON FEDER Geneva Mormons and Catholics huddled. Orthodox rabbis and Moslem imams compared notes....
...Presumably, this would give your 15-year-old daughter the right to hang with bikers (association), pierce various body parts (expression), and receive instruction in sexual techniques and referrals to abortion clinics (information...
...Carlson convened the first World Congress of Families in Prague in 1997...
...In consequence, "They will have to look to foreign migration, as is happening now, just to keep their factories and social services running...
...The total fertility rate (the number of children the average woman will bear in her lifetime) has plunged from 5 in 1950 to 2.7 today, a decline of over three-fifths...
...The committee in charge of monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has ordered China to legalize prostitution and Kyrgyzstan to legalize lesbianism...
...Sex is no longer seen as a wonderful and sacred gift...
...A worldwide survey by the Wirth-lin organization, released just before the Geneva meeting, showed that 84 percent of respondents favor the definition of marriage as "one man and one woman," 78 percent believe the family is "the fundamental unit of society," and 50 percent agree that "families with multiple children help improve society" (in the United States this rises to 70 percent), while only 34 percent believe they are a net detriment...
...The United Nations was very much on the minds of the 1,500-plus delegates to the second conference, drawn from as many as 60 countries...
...Austin Ruse, director of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and a member of the World Congress of Families planning committee, believes a bloc of 12 Latin American Catholic countries and Muslim states, working in close cooperation, could derail any proposal adverse to the traditional family...
...Convention on the Rights of Children (as yet unratified by the United States) promulgates a child's hypothetical right to "freedom of expression and association" as well as the absolute freedom to "receive and impart information...
...The mission statement for the conference warns of the relentless advance of ideologies that "deny the natural origin and status of the family, . . . the miracle of fertility and procreation, the dignity and worth of every human person and the autonomy of the family itself...
...Jehan Sadat, widow of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and Alfonso Cardinal Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, received standing ovations...
...Wilkins was mobilized the following year at the U.N.'s Habitat Conference in Istanbul...
...It has in fact fallen from the 2.2 percent annual growth of the 1960s to an estimated 1.2 percent in 2000...
...Carlson explains that in describing the family as "natural," the U.N.'s 1948 document recognized a profound truth—that "the human family system has its basis in human nature: that is, in the very biological and psychological makeup of men and women...
...In time, they might even bring the world body back to where it started...
...The professor confesses, "I became a little concerned...
...Earlier this year, the U.N.'s Hague Youth Forum proposed that children as young as 10 receive "comprehensive training in sexual expression, sexual pleasure and sexual orientation...
...In a brief and moving address, Ogola surveyed the devastation of the sexual revolution...
...Nicholas Eberstadt of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies observed that "population growth looks to be in unmistakable decline...
...forums...
...After decades of war on motherhood and large families, "The deserts of the West are likely to remain barren forever...
...Welcome to the World Congress of Don Feder is a Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist who addressed the World Congress of Families II on media bias...
...Parental interference would be classified as child abuse...
...Activists and scholars at the conference see a plague of childlessness producing a graying population in the developed world, where today 1 in 10 is over 60 years of age and by the middle of the next century the figure will balloon to 1 in 5. Says Tatad: "In the West, a severe demographic winter has turned once vigorous societies into a murderous desert from which all celebration of conjugal love and human life has been banished forever...
...The entire industrialized world (79 countries with 44 percent of the Earth's population) now has a below-replacement fertility level...
...its ongoing mission, to defend and promote "the stability, autonomy and fecundity of the natural family...
...Sessions also considered the impact of divorce, contraception, abortion, child abuse, bioethical challenges, the corrupting influence of the entertainment media, and sex education...
...In light of the foregoing, delegates agreed that a coalition must unite people of different faiths (all were represented at the conference) to fight for their common values...
...Wilkins favors the establishment of a permanent secretariat for the World Congress of Families to "set a global pro-family agenda...
...A law professor from Tokyo University deconstructed the concept of children's rights...
...Carlson, a social historian, began to network with family activists outside the United States in 1995...
...Geneva was a milepost on the admittedly arduous road to an international renaissance of ideals long in disfavor with Western elites and under siege at the United Nations...
...Besides organizing future conferences, it would foster cooperation and cross-fertilization among national organizations...
...has slipped into the iron grip of agenda-driven bureaucrats and their feminist allies in increasingly influential NGOs...
...Proposals under consideration by the International Criminal Court define the denial of abortion, in those nations where the procedure is still illegal, as "forced pregnancy," a crime against humanity...
...Margaret Ogola of Kenya, a physician who runs a hospice for HlV-posi-tive orphans, received the longest sustained applause...
...What shocked him into action was a resolution describing marriage as the subjugation of women, and another seeking to legalize same-sex unions worldwide...
...Nicaragua's minister of the family listened attentively as a physician from Kenya described the impact of birth control on a tribal culture...
...At the U.N., those ideologies are ascendant...
...In contrast to the aversion reaction surrounding the recent arrival of the Earth's six-billionth inhabitant, delegates (pro-natalists all) focused on what they see as a coming depopulation crisis...
...In the words of the mission statement adopted in Rome earlier this year, the natural family is the "lifelong covenant of a man and a woman" for the purposes of "satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love...
...Families II, convened in Geneva, Switzerland, November 14-17...
...This is reinforced by sex education "based entirely on how pregnancy and disease could be avoided...
...Asians and Africans who manage to learn the language well will become tomorrow's Europeans...
...This transnational alliance also would serve as a growing NGO presence at U.N...
...Thanks to contraceptives and their worldwide marketing—most people could get away with infidelity and premarital sex—but deception of course quietly destroys relationships...
...In an upcoming policy report, Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation details how, both subtly and overtly, U.N...
...Through its population fund, the world body has expended billions of dollars on population control or, in the words of Francisco Tatad, a Filipino senator who addressed the congress, "trying to cure childbearing among married women...
...Wilkins made the second a joint effort, combining the resources of Brigham Young and his own convert's zeal with the Howard Center's scholarship and the international network Carlson had cultivated...
...No morals or responsibility to anyone is mentioned—except mutual momentary consent...
...conventions, conferences, commissions, and agencies push a population-control, abortion-rights, children's liberation, genderbending program...
...The World Congress of Families was spearheaded by two individuals: Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center, a pro-family think tank in Rockford, Illinois, and Richard Wilkins, a law professor who runs a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the World Family Policy Center at Brigham Young University...
...nor the power to beget children as anything very special...
...From the positive pronouncements of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which celebrated the family as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society" and, as such, "entitled to protection by society and the State"), the U.N...
...Thus, the U.N...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
