What a confusing week for human rights activists. On Monday, December 9, President Clinton played Tickle-Me Bill when China’s defense minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, the Tiananmen trigger-man, dropped by the White House for a romp.
The next day, International Human Rights Day, the president tried to beef up his human-rights reputation by giving some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the deservedly dormant United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. (Let’s see . . . UNCEAFDAW?) The treaty was approved by the U.N. in 1979 and by President Carter in 1980, but was prudently never sent to the Senate. Clinton’s resurrection of it will certainly please human rights activists (at least those on the left) miffed by Monday’s heart-to-heart with Chi. And it also afforded the president the opportunity to scold the Senate, especially those nasty Republicans, by calling their failure to ratify the treaty an “embarrassment.”
Not so fast. There’s a good reason why every Senate since 1979, Republican and Democratic, has let this sleeping dog lie. Rather than an actual human- rights treaty, the document is the National Organization for Women’s blueprint for utopia. It mandates complete sex equality in the military, the overthrow of market wages and implementation of “comparable worth” pay scales, rigid gender quotas, abortion on demand, and federally mandated child care.
The only embarrassment here is that of seeing the president capitulate, on successive days, to the Tyranny of Tiananmen and the Tyranny of Estrogen.
