The marriage of sexual liberationism and totalitarianism

In his biography of John Paul II, George Weigel tells of how, in the third preparatory session for the World Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994, liberals led by the United States delegation put through a truly radical draft document joining total sexual liberationism (including an unrestricted globally recognized right to abortion) with bureaucratic totalitarianism. While a coalition of the Vatican and several Third-World countries managed to get rid of much of the radical language at the Cairo conference, the draft document gives a good idea of the fundamental direction of liberalism. Here is Weigel’s original passage about it from an article in First Things on which the chapter in his book was based:

… “Choice,” the mantra of U.S. proponents of abortion-on-demand (along with “gay rights,” “alternative forms of marriage,” and all the rest of it), became the antiphon of the draft Cairo document produced by Prep-Com III. The results, to put it gently, were striking.

“Marriage” was the dog that didn’t bark in the Cairo draft document. In fact, the only time the word “marriage” appeared in the draft document’s chapter on “the family” was in a passage deploring “coercion and discrimination in policies and practices related to marriage.” But this was hardly surprising, in that the draft document, while frequently noting the importance of “the family in its various forms,” said absolutely nothing about the importance of families rooted in stable marriages for the physical and mental well-being of children. Nor did the draft document have much else to say about the natural and moral bond between parents and children and its importance for achieving many of the document’s laudable goals, such as improved health care and education for youngsters. Indeed, the document sundered the moral relationship between parents and teenage children by treating sexual activity after puberty as a “right” to be exercised at will, and by suggesting that state population and “reproductive health care” agencies be the primary interlocutors of young men and women coming to grips with their sexuality.

The Cairo draft document also proposed establishing a new category of internationally recognized human rights, viz., “reproductive rights,” of which the right to abortion-on-demand was, not surprisingly, the centerpiece….

The draft document produced by Prep-Com III also had a nasty totalitarian edge to it. In a striking passage that reflected the affinity between the Kultur of Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomasson, on the one hand, and the agenda of Bella Abzug and International Planned Parenthood, on the other, governments were instructed to “use the entertainment media, including radio and television soap operas and drama, folk theater, and other traditional media” to proselytize for the draft document’s ideology and “program of action.” And in order to insure that the usual male reprobates got the word, the draft document instructed governments to get the message of “reproductive rights” and “gender equity” out by instituting programs that “reach men in their workplaces, at home, and where they gather for recreation,” while adolescent boys should be “reached through schools, youth organizations, or wherever they congregate.” In sum, there was to be no area of life—home, workplace, gym, ballpark—into which state-sponsored propaganda on “reproductive rights and reproductive health” did not intrude.

Those of us who had thought that this approach to public policy had been consigned to the trash heap of history in 1989 had evidently been mistaken.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2002 01:27 PM | Send