The Rights Stuff: Pompeo’s New Commission Tackles Freedom
We know how the founders defined human rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Two hundred forty-three years later, those rights haven’t changed — but our understanding of them certainly has.
We know how the founders defined human rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Two hundred forty-three years later, those rights haven’t changed — but our understanding of them certainly has. There wouldn’t be enough parchment in colonial America if Thomas Jefferson had to include all of the ridiculous new interpretations of the concept. Suddenly, free health care is a “basic human right.” So is college tuition, U.S. immigration, and abortion-on-demand. If Americans want to advance human rights, President Trump believes, we have to agree on what they are. And that’s where the State Department comes in.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a big step to make sure Americans are all reading off the same page when it comes to our fundamental freedoms. Words like “rights,” he said at this morning’s press conference, can be used for “good and evil.” It’s time, he insisted, to revisit the most basic questions. “The distinctive mark of Western civilization is the belief in the inherent worth of human beings, with the attendant respect for God-authored rights and liberties,” Pompeo has said. What are those rights and liberties? His new commission aims to explain.
“…[T]he Trump administration has embarked on a foreign policy that takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government,” the secretary told reporters. “Those principles have long played a prominent role in our country’s foreign policy, and rightly so. But as that great admirer of the American experiment Alex de Tocqueville noted, democracies have a tendency to lose sight of the big picture in the hurly-burly of everyday affairs. Every once in a while, we need to step back and reflect seriously on where we are, where we’ve been, and whether we’re headed in the right direction, and that’s why I’m pleased to announce today the formation of a Commission on Unalienable Rights.”
And not a moment too soon, proponents say. “Defending and promoting freedom is an essential element of U.S. foreign policy,” Aaron Rhodes agreed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “and one that’s been neglected by recent administrations… Rather than focus on freedom, they’ve sought to impose particular moral values on other societies. They have ignored and abrogated important standards in their own conduct of U.S. policy.” Without any transcendent point of reference, he explains, “human rights are seen as arbitrary ‘values,’ no different from the laws of rulers and legislatures that authentic human-rights standards are there to constrain.”
Of course, not everyone was happy with the announcement. Organizations on the far-Left, who’ve spent the last several years cloaking their social agendas in the language of “human rights,” are worried Pompeo will get in the way of their global activism. After all, professor Clifford Bob points out in the Washington Post, the Trump administration was already working to return the definition of “human rights” to its roots, “purg[ing] all references to ‘sexual and reproductive health’ at the United Nations since 2017.”
But, as this administration would tell you, the term “human rights” never should have been used as an ideological weapon in the first place. This commission’s job, Rhodes explains, is to recognize what real freedom and dignity looked like “before it was exploited to serve political agendas.” Once it does, America can start truly holding the world’s worst abusers accountable.
The work, Secretary Pompeo agrees, is urgent. “Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for ‘rights,’ even pretending to be avatars of freedom.” He’s right. Unfortunately, the global consensus on human rights has eroded so much over the last several years that some of the greatest offenders on the international stage have wormed their way onto “human rights commissions” in their search for international legitimacy. The commission’s work could “help reorient” groups like the United Nations, Pompeo hopes, back to their original missions.
For now, we join the millions of people around the world in applauding the Trump administration. By taking such a strong leadership role, they’re helping every country see the importance of protecting these basic freedoms. That matters — because in the end, the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly aren’t just American rights — they’re human rights.
Originally published here.
New Teacher Bill a Training Wreck
Apparently, it’s not enough that schools are indoctrinating students — they want to brainwash teachers too! In California’s public schools, where the districts have their hands full just raising test scores, it looks like the faculties will have to take time out from actual educating to master a new subject: LGBT sensitivity.
Under a new bill just approved by the state assembly, every junior high and high school teacher would be ordered to undergo training on how to support kids who identify as LGBTQ. That includes everything from referring students to activist organizations to launching school-wide efforts aimed at encouraging confusion like transgenderism. The legislation, AB 243, passed unanimously — 61-0, with virtually every Republican refusing to vote.
Our friends at California Family Council are horrified that anyone would force teachers to promote an agenda that the American College of Pediatricians calls “child abuse.” “This mandated training,” CFC’s Greg Burt warns, “will put Christian public school teachers in the position of promoting and approving beliefs that clash with their biblical values. This conflict is already happening. According to information the California Family Council recently received from concerned Christian elementary school teachers, LGBTQ teacher training is already being used to shame teachers into promoting gender and sexual orientation beliefs they disagree with.”
Amazingly, the idea of these annual in-services is so radical that when it passed in the last legislative session, even former Governor Jerry Brown, a liberal, vetoed it. As far as he was concerned, there were plenty of laws already in place to stop discrimination in California schools. “If local schools find that more training or resources on this topic is needed, they have the flexibility to use their resources as they see best,” he said in September.
But unfortunately, California’s extreme wing isn’t easily deterred. The proposal is headed to the Senate Education Committee, where leaders will hopefully hear some of the horrifying accounts of teachers who’ve already been exposed to similar training for even younger grades. “One school teacher from a school district just north of San Diego described how the LGBT training she received last January ridiculed her Christian upbringing and forced teachers to raise their hands to expose their beliefs on gender in order to shame them… Teachers who admitted their parents had a binary/biblical view of gender were told how wrong and backward those views were.”
“Teachers also received instructions on keeping secrets from parents. ‘It was shared with us that when a child tells us they are transgender, gay, or want to be the opposite sex we are not allowed to share it with their parents,’ the teacher explained. The preferred name and pronoun of the student should be used, but ‘it should be kept private until the child is ready to share it with the parents.’”
In handouts, elementary school staff were encouraged “to help little children transition away from their sex assigned at birth’ to their ‘affirmed gender.’” And that was on top of asking those same districts to do away with gender-specific sports, restrooms, and locker rooms.
The bill’s sponsors say they want to end bullying — which is ironic, since this training would be institutionalizing it! Either way, the threat is real. If you or someone you know lives in California, make sure they take the time to contact their state senators. For contact information or to identify specific members of the Senate Education Committee, follow this link. To make sure you’re prepared when an idea like this hits your home state, check out FRC’s publication, “A Parents’ Guide to the Transgender Movement in Education.”
Originally published here.
APA: We’d Like to Teach the World to Swing…
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, the American Psychological Association (APA) decides this: Monogamy is the new bigotry. That’s right. According to the supposed “mental health experts,” open marriages are the tolerant approach to intimacy. And they’ve launched a task force to prove it to the world.
According to the APA’s official description of this initiative, “Finding love and/or sexual intimacy is a central part of most people’s life experience. However, the ability to engage in desired intimacy without social and medical stigmatization is not a liberty for all.” People who practice “consensual non-monogamy,” as they call it, are unduly “marginalized,” and it’s time, the APA argues, to promote “awareness and inclusivity” for people who practice “polyamory, open relationships, swinging, relationship anarchy and other types of ethical, non-monogamous relationships.”
Well, the APA may call these open relationships “ethical,” but the American people sure don’t. In Gallup’s latest survey on moral acceptability, it’s hard to find a behavior more universally frowned upon than adultery or polygamy. Only nine percent of the country agrees with the APA that fidelity is somehow narrow-minded or passé. The multiple-spouse relationship has mildly more support at 18 percent.
Still, the head of the task force writes, “I’m concerned about the lack of support this community is receiving.” “Too many clients who are in consensual non-monogamous (CNM) relationships, have to educate their therapists. Too many of them discontinue therapy because their therapist judged them, didn’t know enough about CNM to be helpful, or worse, makes actively stigmatizing comments…” It’s time, he insists, “to examine our biases and take a non-judgmental posture toward clients engaged in consensual non-monogamy — just as we would with LGBTQ clients.”
FRC’s Cathy Ruse, who — like most — thinks the APA has long been off the rails for some time, can’t believe the organization is fighting to give swingers “protected legal status.” And they’re supposed to be the psychologically healthy ones! Keep in mind, she points out, “the American Psychological Association is a professional guild. When it makes a controversial decision, like this one, that decision is not made by a vote of its 100,000+ members (which include "educators” and “students,” according to Wikipedia). No, it is made by small numbers of powerful activists, who have sought out places of influence, like task forces.“
And how will the APA fight for the liberty of sexual anarchists against "social and medical stigmatization,” she asks? With a measly budget of just over $100 million. Just as it’s tried to tear down the social norms for transgenderism and other sexual proclivities, they’ll start in the usual place — soft targets, like children. “How long will it take American public schools to incorporate swinging into their sex ed?” she wonders. As long as it took them to stigmatize abstinence and promote sexual anarchy in its place? If so, we won’t have to wait long.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
