I’ve been meaning to get to this UN disability treaty but something always comes up. There are a number of reasons the United States shouldn’t ratify this treaty, not to mention that the US leads the world in how it treats the disabled. As Betsy Woodruff pointed out, being against this treaty does not mean one is against the disabled.
Many conservatives oppose its ratification because of language in Article 4 that refers to economic, social, and cultural rights. The treaty says that each signatory should “take measures to the maximum of its available resources . . . with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of these rights.” Our government, based on the Constitution, defines rights in terms of what the government cannot do to its citizens, not in terms of what it owes them. But the U.N. language emphasizes what the signatories owe to their citizens, what they must do in order to protect these newly enumerated “rights.” In the past, we rejected a treaty that referred to “economic, social, and cultural rights,” while Soviet-bloc countries were quick to embrace such language.
And we haven’t even started on how self-abasing it would be for the U.S. to comply with the treaty. Every four years, we would be required to put together an interagency report on our disability-rights record (a project that would cost millions), and also to send a delegation (usually of at least 20 people) to Geneva to appear before a panel of international disability-rights experts. Panels of this sort often vilify our country’s human-rights record, according to Groves. “I’ve attended these sessions,” he says. “They’re absolutely insulting.” He continues: “We have to go to Geneva for what I call our quadrennial spanking, spending millions in assets and sweat and labor to throw ourselves in front of this committee just to get smacked around and told we’re doing a terrible, terrible job.”
Be sure to read the whole thing.
There are also concerns with regard to parental rights.
One concern of HSLDA is that ratifying the CRPD would allow the federal government to force parents who home school their child with a disability to enroll the child in the public school.
Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) lists the reasons the treaty should not be ratified. Families home schooling a child with disabilities and others concerned with protecting freedoms are urged to contact their senators to ask them to vote no on Tuesday. (Read More)
Click here to find out how to contact your Senator. Just be quick about it, because the vote is scheduled for some time Tuesday.
Done. Told Dean Heller. Doubt Harry Reid cares about U.S. Sovereignty (he sucks, generally)
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It’s worse than what you have mentioned. In our federal system, the states are responsible for many things — though not as many as they should be! — and ratification of this treaty would mean that the federal government would be required to add yet another supervisory bureaucracy, to see to it that state laws were in compliance with the treaty.
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Fortunately, it requires a 2/3 approval vote in the Senate to ratify a treaty; this one won’t pass.
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[...] abortion rights and impede the ability of people to homeschool disabled children. (Read More)See my previous post for the reasons ratifying this treaty would have been a bad idea.Tweetvaso linkgoogle_ad_client = [...]
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What happened to my Republican party that used to believe in freedom and equality, you know American values? That’s what this inherently does, this is a joke that we didn’t go along with this.
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Did you read it, Doublespeak? You can’t take the mere TITLE of a goal and determine its worth. This would be bad for the U.S. and not do a legitimate thing for the disabled in other countries.
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Exactly, Liberty 5-3000. Doublespeak should read The Patriot Act and then try to conclude it has anything to do with “patriotism”.
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