The Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), A Summary

Point/Counterpoint in the New York Daily News

Charmaine Yoest: Equal rights or radical fems?

Treaty too radical for life in U.S.

Charmaine wrote a column back in 2002 warning the country about an insidious United Nation’s program (yes, that is redundant, I know) the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The liberal Democrats (again redundant, I know) are working to Eliminate US Soverignty. Here’s how.

New York Daily News

By CHARMAINE YOEST

Radical feminist activists are engaged in a stealth campaign. Unable to pass their social agenda domestically, they are attempting to impose it using the weight and influence of an international treaty. The Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is a massive international Trojan horse, a threat to U.S. sovereignty, cloaked as an effort to protect human rights.

Resurrected from well-deserved political dormancy by Sens. Joseph Biden and Barbara Boxer, the treaty narrowly passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. Next stop is a vote in the full Senate.

Presented as an elevated tome enshrining principles of timeless truth, the guts of the treaty are a leftist utopian wish list: government wage-setting, paid maternity leave, nationalized child care, free maternity-related health care, gender-blind military service and quota-determined political parity for women.

For ratifying countries, these mandates are overseen by an obscure tribunal known as the CEDAW committee. The United States would be required to report to the committee. That way, Cuba’s human-rights expert on the committee can provide oversight of America….

Continue reading at the jump.

Thank you (foot)notes:

Originally published on July 31, 2002 New York Daily News

Charmaine also wrote the news breaking article on CEDAW.

Feminine-genius gets it right, as always.

Our good friend Austin Ruse has an outstanding analysis at the Catholic Defense League.

Dead Men Don’t Rape is pro-CEDAW, as you might have guessed, somehow…see below.

Also pro-CEDAW is Holly’s Fight for Justice. (She is currently engaged; it is not known if he’s a man, a rapist, alive or dead.)

In recent years, the committee has prodded China and Mexico to decriminalize prostitution, chided Belarus for reintroducing Mother’s Day — the holiday promotes a “sexual stereotype” — and informed the U.K. that “the time had come” to revise Ireland’s restrictive abortion law.

Under the committee’s tutelage, stereotyping will be eliminated primarily through “the revision of textbooks” and “the adaptation of teaching methods.” No maternal images, please.

Biden and Boxer, however, continue to assert that CEDAW is simply “an international bill of rights” that “sets out basic standards for women’s rights.” They claim our ratification “would not impose a single new requirement in our laws.” However, the assertion that the treaty is “nonbinding” is directly contradicted by a new directive from the American Bar Association.

The CEDAW Assessment Tool instructs assessors to ask: “What training programs exist to educate judges and other legal professionals about CEDAW’s precedence over national law?” The CEDAW treaty both contradicts American law and is a threat to our national sovereignty. Instead of addressing these substantive concerns, CEDAW supporters start name-calling. This is slanderous.

All people of goodwill are horrified by the human-rights abuses suffered by many women, and men, around the world. We need to promote freedom and equality; we don’t need a radical feminist agenda masquerading as human rights.

[At the time of the article] Yoest, a University of Virginia Bradley Fellow, [was] an Independent Women’s Forum adviser