Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association appeared on Today’s Issues with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins and American Family Association head Tim Wildmon today to call on Religious Right activists to mobilize against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. After passing out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the treaty is up for a vote by the full Senate. But Farris warns that the treaty is too ambiguous and flexible and could mean that children who wear glasses or have ADHD could be placed “under control of the UN treaty.”
Farris: They’re called living documents, just like the disgraced living Constitution theory, which means the treaty doesn’t mean today what it’s going to mean tomorrow what it’s going to mean ten years from now. So you never know what you’re signing up for, that by itself is a good enough reason to leave it alone and to never enter into one of these things. But in particular, you hit the nail on the head Tony, the definition of disability is not defined in the treaty. My kid wears glasses, now they’re disabled, now the UN gets control over them; my child’s got a mild case of ADHD, now you’re under control of the UN treaty. There’s no definitional standard, it can change over time, and the UN, not American policymakers, are the ones who get it decided.
Later, Wildmon wished that the UN would close down and Perkins warned that the State Department is using the UN to impose “radical policies” like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the “homosexual agenda” that “we would never accept here in the United States through our legislature,” not mentioning that treaties require a two-thirds vote in the Senate for ratification.
Wildmon: We get one of these things that we talk about and ask people to call on, I can’t think of the last one that wasn’t just far-leftist junk.
Perkins: There’s nothing that comes out of the UN that’s worth anything.
Wildmon: Just close it down, you know?
Perkins: Let me just tell you, what’s happening in this administration is that the State Department is pushing this radical agenda on a number of things, whether it be the other UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child or the homosexual agenda, they push it in these foreign countries only to have it come back through the backdoor of the UN to the United States. So they’re using the UN as a way to import these radical policies that we would never accept here in the United States through our legislature. You have to pay attention to this stuff.
