On December 18, 1979, the U.N. adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW is another of the United Nation’s assault on the sovereignty of the U.S.
Supporters push the treaty as a needed universal definition of discrimination so that women will know they’ve been discriminated against. It also sticks its nose into nearly every field of human endeavor: politics, law, employment, education, health, commercial transactions and domestic relations and then establishes a Committee to oversee implementation.
Not too much of a surprise but Jimmy Carter signed it on July 17, 1980. Reagan buried it. In 1993, 68 Liberal Senators sent a letter to Bill Clinton asking him to take the necessary steps to ratify it. Clinton tampered with it adding 4 reservations, 3 understandings, and 2 declarations on issues such as comparable worth, paid maternity leave, freedom of speech, private conduct and combat assignments. In 1994 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported it out by a vote of 13 to 5 and Senate Republicans put a hold on the it, blocking it from the Senate floor. In 1995, the treaty was resubmitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for action, where it remained until October 1996. In 1999, Senator Jesse Helms, Chair of the Senate Committee expressed opposition on bringing it to the Senate floor. In 2000, Senator Barbara Boxer introduced a Senate Resolution in support of the treaty and it was once again approved by the Committee in 2002 but the Senate adjourned without acting on ratification and it headed back to Committee. The Bush administration ignored it although the Senate Committee said it was a desirable treaty. Now, Obama and Hillary Clinton are once again pushing for ratification and the current chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, supports ratification.
The U.S. is the only developed nation not to have ratified the treaty, but it has never received one vote on the Senate floor for good reason. CEDAW is not acceptable and not needed in the U.S. The notion that American women need an international treaty to protect them from discrimination is ridiculous.
CEDAW would be a massive interference with U.S. laws as well as our federal/state balance of power. Edmund Muskie, when he served as Secretary of State, admitted that this treaty applied “to private organizations and areas of personal conduct not even covered by U.S. Law.” His memo said that the treaty completely fails to take into account “the division of authority between the states and the federal government.”
Article 1 purports to abolish discrimination against women in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field (?). Private relationships are not the business of the government, much less the business of the United Nations.
Article 2 reiterates that the treaty would “eliminate discrimination against women by any person, organization or enterprise” including customs and practices as well as all public institutions. This article would include mandating the longtime feminist goal of a gender-neutral military.
Article 3 would require us to pass new federal laws, not only in the political arena, but also in “social, economic and cultural fields.”
Article 5 would require us “to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and give assurances that we are following U.N. dictates about “family education.”
Article 10 would make it the federal government’s responsibility to ensure “the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women at all levels and in all forms of education. . .by the revision of textbooks and . . . teaching methods.” It gives the U.N. the authority to revise our textbooks to conform to feminist ideology and semantics.
Article 11 would chain us to the feminist goal that wages should be paid on subjective notions of “equal value” which is a new name for comparable worth, rather than on objective standards of equal w2ork. It would also require another long-time feminist goal of a federal “network of child-care facilities.”
Article 16. would require us to allow women “to decide freely and responsibility on the number and spacing of their children. All this means is that the U.S. would have to allow abortions at any time for any reason but it would not protect Chinese women victimized by China’s policy of forced abortions since China takes the position that it is not responsible for a woman to bear more than one child.
Then it takes a broad attack on states’ rights by obligating the federal government to take over all family law, including marriage, divorce, child custody and property.
Article 17 sets us a U.N. Committee of 23 “experts” to monitor compliance. Already, this Committee of 23 “experts” (from Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, China, Algeria, etc.) have issued negative reports on the practices of countries that were stupid enough to ratify the treaty. They criticized Ireland for “promoting a stereotypical view of the role of women in the home and as mothers;” Belarus for “such symbols as ‘Mother’s Day,”; Slovenia because “less than 30% of children under 3 were in formal government day care; and China for “not decriminalization of prostitution.”
About the only thing CEDAW is good for is to diminish the rights and benefits American women now enjoy and give extraordinary power over U.S. laws to Socialist global bureaucrats.
If you have an hour or two to waste and a bottle of aspirin at hand, you can read CEDAW here.
I can’t help but wonder how the signing nations of Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Pakistan and Syria, are handling all the anti-discrimination women’s rights issues contained in the treaty!
