The Senate Voting Down The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a Very Good Thing

It is good news that the Senate voted down the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Treaty.  This nation has already ceded too much power to the U.N., an agency which has not only shown to be useless but has also proven to be harmful to world peace keeping operations in the past, so the fact that we avoided ceding more power to this global entity is a very good thing. . 

David Kopel of The New York Times says that The U.S. Is Right To Be Skeptical of U.N. treaties. He gives examples of past treaties to show the crazy and dangerous nature of the U.N.'s interpretation of what we would believe to be innocuous language. 

When many nations (not including the U.S.) ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, they had no way of knowing that the U.N. would declare Mothers Day to be illegal, if a nation’s version of that holiday puts too much emphasis on women’s role as mothers. 

Nor could governments ratifying that "discrimination against women" treaty foresee that the U.N. would later decide that it mandates the legalization of prostitution, or numerical gender quotas in both government and the private sector. 

Similarly, if you just read the text of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, you might never guess that the U.N. would decide that the U.S. must stop executing murderers, must allow convicted felons to vote and must change the procedures for judicial review of the detention of the terrorists held at Guantanamo. Whatever else one thinks about Guantanamo, the notion that it is a form of racial discrimination is ludicrous. 

It’s true that a U.N. committee cannot force Congress to enact new statutes. But executive branch officials can use the U.N. committee’s orders as a pretext to create new regulations “implementing” a treaty. Aggressive judges can rule that a treaty (which pursuant to the U.S. Constitution is “the supreme law of the land”) means exactly what the U.N. says it does.

David goes on to say: 

The disabilities treaty was rife with flaws — requiring government at every level in the U.S. to spend “the maximum of its available resources” on disabled services, granting Congress new powers to regulate private homes and personal behavior, and creating a new legal right to abortion, independent of Roe v. Wade. Efforts by senators to add reservations to address some of these issues were rejected by treaty proponents. 

But even if the textual language in the treaty were perfect, the fact that the future meaning of the disabilities treaty will be decided by U.N. bureaucrats was reason enough for the Senate to reject the treaty. 

I am in full agreement with David Kopel.  

Before the treaty of voted down Glenn Beck had Rick Santorum call in to his program and explain how detrimental the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities would be to those with special needs and their parents.