UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: The international body is becoming more and more a machine that fashions the language of human rights into a weapon of religious oppression.
by ASHLEY E. McGUIRE 06/11/2014
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world, which we must not allow any nation to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression.”
She herself chaired the drafting committee of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirmed the “freedom of thought, conscience or religion” as among the most important of human rights, and served as a delegate to the fledgling body formed to protect the rights of people everywhere.
Sadly, today, the United Nations is increasingly becoming a platform for turning human-rights language and treaty bodies into vehicles for intolerance and religious oppression, aimed with particular zeal at the Catholic Church. And our own government is party to it.
Since the start of 2014, the Church has come under attack at the United Nations not once, but twice. Catholics were shocked and caught off guard when the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a report in February, which, for example, simultaneously called on the Church to enact greater protections for children from all forms of violence while demanding that she change her Code of Canon Law when it comes to abortion.
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