CHILDREN OF, BY, AND FOR THE STATE: A LEGAL FRAMEWORK
By
Debra Rae
March 1, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
Childrenare one-third of our population and all of our future.[1] Ostensibly providing for the rights of children worldwide, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is a universally agreed upon set of non-negotiable standards and obligations. Its three Optional Protocols shelter children from trafficking, prostitution, and child pornography; prohibit their recruitment in armed conflict; and allow children to file legal grievances.[2] No fault here, right?
Think again. What our Founding Fathers affirmed as inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, the global community ascribes to government—specifically, global government. Certainly, no caring person argues for abuse or neglect of children. However, scattered throughout the U.N. Convention’s fifty-four Articles are “new” rights that, all told, exceed in length the entire U.S. Constitution!
Arguably, “the institution of marriage/family is absolutely critical to everything we have known in Western civilization.” It is, in fact, “a centerpiece of the Judeo-Christian system of values”[3] which, unfortunately, is not universally up held. Case in point:In the words of the Communist Party Education Workers Congress, “We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families.”[4] Hillary Clinton believes “there’s no such thing as other people’s children.”[5] In her Brave New World, “everyone belongs to everyone else”and,to guide children aright, superfluous parents must step aside.
First Lady Michelle Obama agrees, “We can’t just leave it up to parents.”[6] Phooey. Babies don’t come with instruction manuals, it’s true; however, when loving parents exercise common sense and willingly accept responsibility for their children, society flourishes. For instance, parents instinctively know better thanto believe the American Psychological Association’snonsensical contention that children are “not typically harmed by adult-child sex.”[7] Puh-leeze.
All Traditions That Harm
Recently, a U.N. panel on children’s rights spotlighted a politically incorrect law signed by President Vladimir Putin, thereby igniting ire at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. For allegedly stigmatizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, including children, traditionalists purportedly incite violence.[8] Putin hardly qualifies as a moral compass. Even so, like it or not, he is not alone in limiting “family” to the orthodox, traditional model.[9]
Inadvancing the faulty notion that traditional families no longer matter,[10] global bureaucratsoppose “all traditions that demean, dehumanize, and injure”; butwho’s to say which traditions are injurious? In Somerset, Scotland, authorities yanked an eleven-year-old boy from the loving care of foster parents after the Christian couple refused to sign an equality agreement endorsing homosexuality.Not the child’s best interest, but special interests triumphed.
Government (No Longer Father) Knows Best
Although the state is loath to accept responsibility for its own failed childrearing policies,[11] the 1989 convention advances U.N. belief that government knows best for everyone;and, as a permanent fixture in the life of every child, state agentsbelong at the very heart of families.In 1998, Representative Henry J. Hyde exposed a movement for cradle-to-grave tracking of newborns of first-time parents. Intervention through Healthy Families America, he warned, is excessive to the extreme.[12]
A prime example of what Rep. Hyde warned against, the Children and Young People Bill, authorizes local officials to assign an adult overseer—specifically, a government appointee who knows the child—for every child under the age of 18 born in Scotland. A first point of contact, the “named person” is a health visitor, head (or deputy head) teacher. The nation’s astute Schoolhouse Home Education Association characterizes them as “just plain busybodies” with “arbitrary and oppressive” governmental powers.[13]
In enforcing standards of the U.N. Conference on the Rights of the Child, “health and safety zealots obsessed with risk management” are trigger happy, as it were, to initiate investigations. Scrutiny of the mundane—i.e., a child’s diet—threatens to implicate even good, law-abiding parents. With legal authority to see that children are raisedin a government-approved manner (reminiscent ofHitler Youth), the liaison records and stores personal details on a central database which, in turn, is shared with other authorities and agencies—no parental consent required.
Kid Power: Third Optional Protocol
Apparently, the global plan calls for emasculating parents while, at the same time, empowering kids. Costa Rica recently became the tenth country to ratify the Third Optional Protocol of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,anew legal instrument to enable individual children, groups of children, or their representativesto file complaints with the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.[14] Child-sensitive procedures and safeguards allegedly disallow manipulation and/orsubsequent reprisals for filing, but opponents aren’t convinced. Free World decision-making powers should neveremanate from a U.N. treaty.
Legislative Control Mechanism[15]
Though not ratified by the United States, provisions relating to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child continue to recycle and resurface—e.g., universal primary education, logically preceded by a required national system of daycare. Article 18 mandates government development of institutions, facilities, and services to care for children of working parents.
In his 12 February 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called on Congress “to expand access to high-quality preschool to every child in America.” Accordingly, the President proposed a series of new investments to establish “a continuum of high-quality early learning for a child, beginning at birth and continuing to age five.” You heard right: from birth.
Recall that, after lengthy debate (1990), Congress specifically rejected national daycare standards as part of the ABC Child Care Bill.[16] This begs the question, “Are we now to have Congress overridden by a United Nations mandate?” Moreover, is it "neglect" not to establish government daycare centers—or to expose children to more illnesses in daycare centers? Not parents, but United Nations judges will decide.[17]
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Canon Law or U.N. Convention?
Disturbingly, some fear that U.N. soft law creates an across-the-board right to abortion that potentially overrides U.S. law and Supreme Court decisions.[18] With respect to abortion, contraception, illegitimacy, HIV/AIDS, gender stereotypes in textbooks, and corporal punishment, a U.N. Committee on the Rights of A Child already badgers the Catholic Church to exchange Canon Law for U.N. conventions. Increasingly, international law applies intense pressure to alter existing statutory law.[19]
“Freedom,” Reagan warned, “is never more than one generation from extinction.”[20] Hitler recognized, “As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”[21] To that, freedom lovers everywheredoggedly decree, “Not on my watch.”
� 2014 Debra Rae - All Rights Reserved
Footnotes:
1.
Positive
Quotes About Children, accessed 11 February 2014.
2.
Early in 2008, Obama expressed his strong commitment to the United Nations
and its various sovereignty-compromising, traditional family-undermining
programs.With Big Brother wrestling the family reins from parental grasp,
Mom and Dad eventually forfeit power to exercise their God-given authority.
If ratified, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) could
prosecute parents who deny their own children access to violent movies,
music, videos, or computer games.That the focus has shifted dramatically
from home to state schools and from academics to emotional health begs
the question, “How is this working?” Apparently, not so
well.
3.
Dr. James Dobson. Family News (Colorado Springs: Focus on the Family,
January 2006). 3.
4.
Communist
Party Education Workers Congress Quotes, accessed 11 February 2014.
5.
What
Liberals Say, accessed 11 February 2014.
6.
Michelle
Obama on Deciding What Kids Eat: ‘We Can’t Just Leave it
Up to The Parents', accessed 11 February 2014.
7.
See Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman, “A Meta
Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using
College Samples,” Psychological Bulletin, 1998, Vol. 124, No.
1, pp. 22-53.
8.
Russia's
Anti-Gay Law Will Impact Foreign Tourists, Possible Olympic Athletes:
Report, accessed 11 February 2014.
9.
Historically, U.S. power was vested in government solely through a legal
conveyance from the people—i.e., the Constitution. Of late, progressively
more international agreements are being used to control even domestic
matters. Once “up for grabs,” this supreme law of our federal
government yields to international law in the form of U.N. conventions
and treaties to which American citizens are bound. Already, state law
has been invalidated by using words of United Nations’ international
treaties. This judicially renders the U.N. Charter the supreme law of
our land. Even more disturbingly, it has become apparent that old international
treaties can be resurrected years and even decades after taking what
attorney Phyllis Schlafly calls “a knockout punch.” At the
global level, “soft law” represents unenforceable agreements
between nations. By appearing to represent global consensus, these have
a way of evolving slowly into enforceable international law in the form
of agreements, conventions, declarations, executive orders, pacts, summits,
and treaties.
10.
Karen S. Peterson. “U.S. Quits Gathering Marriage Statistics,”
USA Today, 1 June, 1999, p. A1.
11.
James Hirsen, JD, Ph.D., Professor of International and Constitutional
Law, Trinity College.
12.
5 October 1998 letter of Rep. Henry J. Hyde to colleagues:Parent Training
for all First-Time Parents (Including up to 50 in-home visits annually).
13.
SNP’s
state guardian plans make ‘good parents fair game’,
accessed 11 February 2014.
14.
15
January 2014, New York; set to go into effect in April, accessed
11 February 2014.
15.
The United Nations’ Year of the Family is a campaign to redefine
the nuclear traditional family in support of cohabitation, single-parent
households, and same-gender partnerships.Intolerance for homosexual
unions is decreed a global threat because non-proliferating alternative
lifestyles, as theirs, bear the sustainability seal of approval. The
same applies to legalized, nonproductive, and “safe” voluntary
prostitution, likewise advanced by an international bill of rights for
women called the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women.
16.
The
"ABC" Child Care Bill: An Attempt to Bureaucratize Motherhood,
accessed 11 February 2014.
17.
Fact
Sheet President Obama’s Plan for Early Education for all Americans,
accessed 11 February 2014.
18.
The
Control Factor: New Legislation Coming from the U.N. and European Parliament,
accessed 11 February 2014.
19.
Presented by Austrian
Green politician Ulrike Lunacek to the European Parliament, the Lunacek
Report argues for special rights and privileges afforded the LBGTcommunity,
lobby groups for which may veto any legislation that goes against their
interests. Additionally, LGBT groups could be granted immunity from
limitations to freedom of speech as applied to other areas of E.U. law;
and homophobic hate crimes would be separately classified.
20.
“Classic Reagan
Quotes,” Annual Meeting of the 30 March 1961 Phoenix Chamber of
Commerce, Geocities Web site,
26 August 2004.
21.
Adolf Hitler. Mein
Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943). 403.