Which side are we on in the"Clash of Civilizations"?
<<< ... After twenty years of stalling by Jesse Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early June held hearings on the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty ratified by 169 nations. (President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but the Senate blocked it.) George W. Bush originally indicated that he would sign it--that was when he was sending Laura onto the airwaves to blast the Taliban--but under the influence of Ashcroft, he's since been hedging. Naturally, the religious right has been working the phones: According to one e-mail that came across my screen, the operator who answers the White House comment line assumed the writer was calling to oppose CEDAW, so heavily were the calls running against it. The reasons? CEDAW would license abortion, promote homosexuality and teen sex and destroy The Family. In 2000, Helms called it "a terrible treaty negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining their anti-family agenda into international law."
How radical can CEDAW be, you may ask, given that it's been ratified by Pakistan, Jordan and Myanmar? Genderquake is hardly around the corner. Still, across the globe women have been able to use it to improve their access to education and healthcare as well as their legal status. In Japan, on the basis of a CEDAW violation, women sued their employers for wage discrimination and failure to promote; the Tanzanian High Court cited CEDAW in a decision to overturn a ban on clan land inheritance for women. Given the dire situation of women worldwide, it is outrageous to see US policy in the grip of Falwell, James Dobson and Ralph Nader's good friend Phyllis Schlafly. Like the Vatican, which uses its UN observer status to make common cause with Islamic fundamentalist governments on behalf of fetus and family, on CEDAW the Bush Administration risks allying itself with Somalia, Qatar and Syria to promote the religious right agenda on issues of sexuality. In the same way, at the recent UN General Assembly Special Session on the Child--where the United States opposed providing girls with sex education beyond "just say no," even though in much of the Third World the typical "girl" is likely to be married with children--the Bush Administration allied itself with Libya, Sudan and evil axis member Iran. Some clash of civilizations ... >>>
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