T. Jeremy Gunn, the Religious Right and the Opposition to U.s. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

• Citation: Vol. 20 No. 1
• Publication year: 2006

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT AND THE OPPOSITION TO U.S. RATIFICATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

T. Jeremy Gunn^*

INTRODUCTION

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was adopted unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly on November 20, 1989, eleven days after the Berlin Wall fell.¹In the months surrounding the CRC vote, all of the European communist allies of the former Soviet Union collapsed, and the latter was itself in the throes of dissolution.²The USSR and its allies, the threat of which had been a core theme of American political life for more than forty years, were disintegrating. But, at the exact moment that the communist world in Europe was collapsing, some Americans associated with the religious right had already identified a dangerous new international threat: an assault on the "traditional family." The United Nations, which many Americans had previously accused of being the willing handmaiden of expansionist and atheistic communism, was instantly transformed into a villain engaged in an intentional campaign to destroy the traditional American family. The CRC, which was adopted unanimously and was quickly ratified by every country in the world except the United States and Somalia, became fodder in the American "culture wars" that had been announced by the religious right and its allies.³For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation's principal expert on family issues and the CRC put it succinctly: "The United Nations has become the tool of a powerful feminist-socialist alliance that has worked deliberately to promote a radical restructuring of society."⁴A representative of the Family Research Council, founded by the Reverend James Dobson, criticized the CRC by saying, "I know some conservatives want to pull out of the United Nations, and treat it as irrelevant. The problem is, we can't. For if we do, enemies of the family will create and use international law to undermine the family."⁵The "religious right," here represented by the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, has firmly opposed the CRC since at least the mid-1990s and has successfully blocked its ratification.

Ironically, the drafting of the CRC (1979-1989) largely overlapped the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), who has long been a favorite of American conservatives and the religious right. The U.S. State Department, during the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, played an active and extremely influential role in shaping the text of the document, which was completed during the first year of the Bush administration.⁶American diplomats, working in tandem with a broad range of American non-governmental organizations (NGOs), had been successful in virtually every contentious part of the Convention. The final document was accepted unanimously in the General Assembly, and the vast majority of states ratified the CRC within the first twelve months of its adoption. The Holy See, whose opposition to birth control and abortion could be questioned by none, and whose support for families and "traditional values" was equally beyond doubt, ratified the CRC less than six months later, on April 20, 1990.⁷Thus, within a year, almost all countries of the world had ratified the CRC, making it the most universally admired and least controversial human rights convention that had yet been drafted or adopted.

Yet only five years later, the CRC appeared to have no prospects for ratification in the United States because of the hostile reaction that had come from the American religious right, which had quickly reached the conclusion that the Convention was anti-family, anti-religion, and anti-American. What happened? How could a treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and that was accepted virtually universally in the world (including by the Vatican) be not only rejected by religious conservatives, but rejected with such vehemence that they succeeded in preventing it even from being referred to the U.S. Senate for its advice and consent? How could the religious right and the United States be so thoroughly out of touch with the Holy See and every other country in the world except for the failed state of Somalia?⁸

Although the Reagan and Bush administrations had negotiated and voted for the CRC at the United Nations, the first President Bush neither signed it nor forwarded it to the Senate for its advice and consent. President Bush certainly did not take an active interest in promoting the CRC. The year 1989, for him, was not a time to focus on the rights of children, but on the unfolding "new world order" and the "peace dividend." When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, prompting a counter-invasion in 1991 by the United States and its coalition partners, the CRC could not have been further from his mind. For whatever reason, the CRC seems not to have captured the interest of the Bush administration. In his 560-page memoir on foreign policy, written in conjunction with his principal foreign policy adviser, Brent Scowcroft,

President Bush never even mentioned the CRC.⁹

The supporters of the CRC, unlike its opponents, failed to mount an effective grass roots campaign and did not employ the same style of alarmist rhetoric.¹⁰Indeed, the rhetorical firepower and allusions regarding international conspiracies against the United States led to the replacement, whether consciously or coincidentally, of the term "cold war" with "culture wars."¹¹With the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, some began to look elsewhere for an organizing principle to guide American politics. Patrick Buchanan, the man who had challenged incumbent President Bush in his own party, gave voice in 1992 to what had increasingly become identified as a major political issue: the culture wars.¹²In a speech to the Republican Convention in 1992, Buchanan identified the conflict that had, for many

Americans, replaced the Cold War:

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.¹³

Buchanan described the battlegrounds of the new cultural war as including the issues of abortion, homosexual rights, pornography, prayer in schools, "Judeo-

Christian values," the institution of marriage, and whether "12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents."¹⁴Buchanan's "culture war" speech overshadowed most other events at the 1992 Republican National Convention and has been interpreted as both galvanizing the religious right and as alienating many Americans who saw it as too extreme. Though the term "culture war" already existed in the political lexicon, it was Patrick Buchanan's call to arms that entrenched it in public discussion.¹⁵

The religious right did not support George Bush for re-election with the same enthusiasm that they had supported him with as the heir to the Reagan mantle in his first campaign. Bill Clinton defeated George Bush in 1992, partly through the assistance of third-party candidate Ross Perot, who cut into Bush's support. Throughout the 1992 election, however, one of the galvanizing symbols for the conservative opponents of Clinton was his wife, Hillary, who was a direct target of many of the barbs during the campaign- including several delivered by Buchanan himself in his convention speech.¹⁶

For some political opponents of Clinton, particularly on the religious right, it was galling to think that the First Lady was a liberal, well-educated, opinionated, successful, and articulate woman who supported the very issues that had been identified as battlegrounds in the culture wars: access to contraceptives, rights of children, child care outside the home, rights of abortion, rights for homosexuals, women in the military, and rights for women.

Following the final vote on the CRC in 1989, the American Bar Association began to analyze the Convention with respect to its potential legal effect in the United States,¹⁷while NGOs favoring the CRC lobbied both the White House and Congress to promote ratification. Notable among those who supported ratification were Marian Wright Edelman, the Founder of the influential Children's Defense Fund (CDF), as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton, the First Lady of Arkansas who was also the CDF's Chairman of the

Board from 1986 to 1992.¹⁸For most Americans, however, the question of U.S. ratification of the Convention remained a matter of little interest during the last years of the Bush administration and the first years of that of President Clinton.¹⁹For practical purposes the CRC lay dormant.

On February 10, 1995, the Clinton administration awakened the slumbering CRC and announced that the United States would sign it in the first step of the ratification process. In a move that could not but help galvanize the religious right, the announcement was made by none other than the person whom it had already vilified as a feminist enemy of the traditional family, First Lady Hillary Clinton. The following week, on February 16, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, signed the Convention on behalf of the

United States.²⁰That same day, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey made an impassioned plea for President Clinton to forward the CRC to the Senate for its advice and consent.²¹The religious right opponents mobilized instantly and launched grass-roots "action alerts" and letter-writing campaigns, urging Senators and members of Congress to voice their opposition.²²

The first results of the opposition's letter-writing campaign were felt almost immediately. On February 24, only eight days after the CRC was signed in New York City, Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole announced that "in the past several days, I have received thousands of calls from all over the country in...