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By Timothy P. Carney
The Clinton administration's delegation to a special U.N. conference held last week in New York labored to reposition the United States to the left of most U.N. member nations on key social issues.
The U.S. delegation, appointed by the U.S. State Department, fought tooth and nail at the special session -- convened as a five-year follow-up to the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women's Rights -- to push U.N. dogma on families and sexuality further left.
The Clinton delegates toiled to insert language in the conference report that was supportive of homosexuality, "girls' reproductive rights" and liberalized abortion. They also sought to include ambiguous language about "forced pregnancy" and "sexual rights."
The delegation from the Clinton administration formed a working alliance with Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (referred to at the conference by the acronym JUSCANZ), which not only proposed various liberal amendments, but aggressively opposed language sponsored by numerous Middle Eastern and African nations and the Vatican that stressed the role of the family in society and discouraged sexual promiscuity.
At the end of Beijing +5 -- as the conference was called -- the more conservative delegations, spearheaded by the Vatican and a bloc of 77 smaller nations, won the day, keeping out almost all of the Clinton administration-backed language.
Austin Ruse, president of the conservative Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute in New York, called the conference's refusal to go significantly beyond the findings of the 1995 Beijing conference "a victory for our side."
The conference's final document was far from conservative by absolute standards, but it was downright traditional compared to the agenda pushed at the proceedings by liberal delegations and U.S. non-governmental organizations.
Western nations relentlessly advocated that language about sexual orientation be inserted in many areas of the report. The U.S. delegation wanted to list anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuals as an advance for the "human rights of women," and called for more such laws on the national level around the world.
This language offended the more traditional Muslim and African nations, as well as the Holy See, however. These conservative forces then effectively filibustered the proposed changes, forcing the report to default to the less extreme language of Beijing '95.
Conservative forces also opposed inclusion of language calling for the protection of "sexual rights"-- a term never clearly nor fully defined. This apparently calculated indistinctness seemed to be the modus operandi of both the women's groups that attended the conference and the U.S. delegation, contended Ruse.
"They specialize in vague terminology," he said.
In many spots in the report, the U.S. delegates tried to urge nations to increase the availability of abortion. The original Beijing report already had condemned the vague concept of "forced pregnancy," which some say means conception through rape in an attempt to affect the racial makeup of a territory -- an atrocity that has been documented in Bosnia.
Conservatives, however, opposed new language using the term, which they say could refer to prohibiting abortions by law or to the unwillingness of doctors to perform them -- a meaning that a Utah court has given the phrase, according to Ruse.
One liberal victory at Beijing +5 was the addition of a reference to "marital rape," an undefined term that could signify anything from actual uses of physical force to consensual sex consistent with the expectations of traditional marital roles.
Most liberal victories at the conference are evidenced by language kept out of the report. The European Union and JUSCANZ opposed an exhortation by the Holy See to "ensure that all activities of the United Nations system which impact on the family contribute to its protection."
Feminists struck a passage encouraging programs "that acknowledge the social significance of maternity, motherhood and the role of parents in the family and in the upbringing of children."
On June 7, congressional conservatives, led by Rep. Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. condemning the far-left language promoted by the U.S. delegation. The delegation's calls for increased access to abortions and promotion of "sexual rights," the congressmen said, are "contrary to the democratically expressed wishes of the majority of the American people."
Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan called the Clinton administration's showing at Beijing+5 "another example of why the U.S. should cease funding and participating in these jamborees of global socialism."
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