President Clinton this week signed a waiver lifting a restriction on
U.S. funds for international family planning organizations that promote
abortion. The waiver "allows us to pay our U.N. dues finally, and fund
international family planning at 97 percent until the new fiscal year,"
one administration official said. The waiver is one of a series of
moves negotiated with congressional Republicans that will make the
United States a member in good standing of the clique of post-civilized
First World nations taking responsibility to ensure that the rest of the
world is as corrupt as Clinton's America.
Is it a good thing that we are paying our U.N. dues? I don't think
so. In fact, I was one of the people in the Reagan administration who
crafted the policy that withheld our contributions from the United
Nations. The U.N. is an organization that reaches into the pockets of
the working people of this country in order to put our money into the
pockets of the rich people in developing countries. The policy we
developed in the Reagan years in response to this corrupt waste was to
withhold those dollars until the United Nations reformed its corrupt
practices and ceased its opposition to the free enterprise approaches
that could actually help poor countries around the world achieve
economic well being.
I think we should continue to withhold our dues today because the
organization has not responded and has not reformed. Until it does, we
ought to stand firm in our position that we won't take the hard-earned
money of the American people and toss it away to international
bureaucrats who are generally interested in doing nothing but
maintaining their own comfort and security.
But while the material waste and corruption that go on at the U.N.
are reason enough to withhold our support, the Clinton green light for
American funding of international abortionist activism epitomizes the
real evil that the U.N. too often represents. I have called Bill
Clinton a moral thermonuclear bomb, because of
the profound damage he has done to the moral character of the American
people, and particularly to our children, by the example he sets of
moral degradation and self-disrespect. The return of America to the
U.N. fold means that the Clinton bomb is going global.
Much of the world still languishes in conditions of extreme material
deprivation and suffering. But the global, if still uneven, triumph of
entrepreneurial economics -- economic liberty -- that is culminating in
our lifetime will dramatically improve the material condition especially
of the poor. In fact, there has never been a time when the substantial
alleviation of physical human suffering and want in the world was
more immediately attainable. The WTO demonstrators in the streets of
Seattle are right to suspect the anti-democratic and tyrannical
ambitions of the global managers in the international bureaucracy. The
World Trade Organization is the bid for power of global socialism, not
economic liberty. But the demonstrators are wrong in failing to see
that a truly free global marketplace will benefit precisely the billions
of people who will raise themselves to lives of material dignity as soon
as they are given the chance to do so. The material prosperity possible
in the next century will arise not from "managed" global trade, but from
the decline of government interference with the efforts of people all
over the world to build better lives through economic initiatives over
which they retain control and responsibility.
But the opportunity offered by real economic liberty cannot be
recognized or seized by people who have lost the respect for themselves
that is the true foundation of economic striving. Sustainable material
prosperity will come only to people who seek it for the right reasons,
and who understand that justice and moral dignity are the ultimate goods
of this life. At this critical moment of economic opportunity for the
people of the world, the resumption of full American funding of the
global abortion project means that the lesson of self-disrespect is
about to ramp up around the world.
Under slavery in America, black Americans got no respect unless they
gave it to themselves -- and so they did. They retained self-respect
because they looked first to be respected in the eyes of God. They knew
that as long as they kept that faith, the lash that might snuff out
their lives could never take away their dignity. Recent research has
shown that, contrary to the myth that slavery destroyed the black family
and black moral identity, the true story of the period is one of heroic
striving to maintain precisely these things. The result was a people
that understood that dignity came from God and from within, and not from
material circumstances. So when freedom came, the restoration of
families and the development of education and economic initiative
occurred faster than anyone could have predicted who did not understand
the
underlying moral integrity of the black community.
The moral catastrophe in much of the American black community today
is not the result of material deprivation, but of the abandonment of the
vision of moral integrity that sustained first the slaves and then the
freedmen. The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all
the difficulties of life on external factors -- these are the things
that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the
overseers couldn't. Because if you really want to kill people, you've
got to kill their spirit. And as the slaves proved, and as hundreds of
millions of heroic and anonymous people around the world prove every
day, if the moral heart is still beating, material deprivations will not
triumph over the dignity of the human person.
A popular pro-life bumper-sticker says that only half of the patients
entering abortion clinics come out alive. But actually, none do.
Because abortion is the most insidious, the most stealthy, the most
cunning kind of assault on the moral heart. Every time a young woman
walks in to an abortion clinic and asks to take the life of her baby,
she is saying that for the sake of her body she will kill her living
soul.
The mother's belief that she has a worth beyond the whim of human
choice must ultimately depend on her faith -- vague or explicit -- that
her worth comes from God. But if she accepts the view that the baby in
her womb is a life deserving of respect only if she decides to grant
that respect, and that otherwise it can just be disposed of, she is
setting herself up to accept the same conclusion about herself. For the
sake of the material convenience of getting rid of the child, she is
accepting the doctrine that her own worth is not beyond human choice,
but is determined by the whim of whoever happens to have physical power
over her.
The last time this logic prevailed in America was when slaves were
told they had no worth except what they fetched on the auction block.
As long as slaves were useful instruments, they were worth a few hundred
dollars. And when they were not useful instruments they could simply be
disposed of, because their worth came from the decision of the master
race.
The abortion doctrine invites us to set ourselves up to judge the
life of our unborn children, and thus to put ourselves in God's place.
But what we're really doing is resurrecting that old principle that says
that the worth of all human life doesn't come from God, but from human
will. And a person who accepts this principle has nothing left to say
when his own efforts to assert his own dignity, or the dignity of those
he loves, are roughly rejected by anyone or anything that has acquired
sufficient power to assert its will against him. Accepting the abortion
doctrine is the boot camp of human self-disrespect, and it is a thorough
training indeed.
And this is the aid and comfort that the U.N. will now bring with
renewed energy to a world of suffering people, many of whom face
conditions not so different from those that American blacks historically
faced. It is a world of material deprivation and attempted denial of
equal human dignity. It is a world that seeks in many ways to convince
the poor and downtrodden that their hope for better things is
presumptuous, and the poor deserve only what they have, if that, and
only as long as those in power deign to grant it. And it is a world in
which, relentlessly and nobly, the spirit of God-given human dignity in
the souls of those people is at work to lead them to keep asserting
their hope of better things and their right to pursue them in fraternal
equality with the rest of God's children.
To humble souls filled with this noble striving the globalist "master
race" will now offer the poison pill of the abortion doctrine. These
U.N. population planners are fanning out, with American dollars and the
blessing of the high priest of self-disrespect, to convince the people
of the world that human life is contemptible, and its strivings for
justice and dignity the uppity illusion of human trash.
If the people of America permit their government to teach this lesson
to the world, we will owe much more than a billion dollars in back dues,
and to a much higher authority.