The Convention On The Rights Of The Child
A more recent arrival to the “human rights” canon is The Convention On The Rights Of The Child (“CRC”), entering into force in 1990. President Clinton signed the CRC in 1995 but never sent it to the Senate, and the CRC remains unratified to this day, leaving the United States with a barebones duty to avoid violating the CRC’s object and purpose (as with the ICESCR and the CEDAW).
For reasons that should be obvious, children occupy a special place in our hearts: their innocence, inexperience, and relative helplessness demand adult care and instruction. Moreover, children represent society’s future, so we share a vested interest in ensuring their healthy upbringing. While the CRC acknowledges these tender mercies, it also plays upon them to pursue objectives that have neither children’s nor society’s interests at heart. Chief among these is to drive a wedge between the child and the family, which outpaces the other “human rights” treaties insofar as they merely alienate the citizen from his nation (a far less intimate relationship). In particular, the CRC places the child in a vacuum by bestowing “rights” that lack any reference or deference to parents, whose views on proper upbringing may well differ from those of diplomats and professors. So we find Article 13(1) of the CRC guaranteeing a child’s freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,” brushing off the right of parents to monitor the pace and content of their children’s education. If, for example, parents wish to postpone their child’s exposure to sensitive topics such as drug use, birth control or homosexuality, they have no choice but to yield to their child’s unquenchable curiosity. This same Article decrees the child’s “freedom of expression,” which subverts timeless parental authority over a child’s speech and deportment. This child-in-a-vacuum dynamic resurfaces in Articles 14(1) and 15(1), consecrating respectively a juvenile “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and “freedom of association and . . . freedom of peaceful assembly,” again obliterating the parents’ control over the ideas and people to which the child may be exposed.
No parenting worthy of the name can take place under these slack conditions, since parenting embodies the affirmative and laborious act of instilling bedrock standards and values into a young mind that is born without them. But when we consider the ideology at play in most “human rights” treaties – whose avowed purpose is to demolish prevailing attitudes and to remake society – it makes perfect sense to sever the link between the old and the young. As foreshadowed by earlier instruments such as the UDHR and the ICESCR, Article 29 of the CRC steps in to fill the generational gap by prescribing universal educational content, commanding that children absorb a proper “respect” for the U.N. Charter and the “natural environment,” along with a non-judging attitude of “understanding” and “tolerance.” So a child may not, it is presumed, scorn the poverty, corruption and cruelty endemic to several of the world’s cultures in the past and the present; instead, the child must learn to become a values-free automaton. Among these various educational dictates, Article 29 ironically recommends preparing children “for responsible life in a free society,” a goal that the CRC and the other “human rights” treaties consistently conspire to defeat with their imperious commands and constraints. To the extent the CRC concedes any parental rights at all, for example in Article 14(2), it is simply “to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.” Parents may not, in other words, deny any of the child’s “rights” as decreed in the CRC, but rather must cooperate with the CRC to implement them.
The Committee created by the CRC to monitor national compliance has wasted no time in making ominous pronouncements such as this: “The effective promotion of article 29(1) requires the fundamental reworking of curricula to include the various aims of education and the systematic revision of textbooks and other teaching materials and technologies, as well as school policies.” This educational crusade even calls for asserting political control over the media, since “[g]overnments are obligated by the Convention, pursuant to article 17(a), to take all appropriate steps to ‘encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child.’” Parents should not go thinking that they retain disciplinary authority within the confines of the home, since “States parties [must] move quickly to prohibit and eliminate all corporal punishment . . . .” The Committee is undaunted by the fact that the CRC does not specifically prohibit “corporal punishment,” taking a cue from American constitutional lawyers when declaring that “the Convention, like all human rights instruments, must be regarded as a living instrument, whose interpretation develops over time.” This ensures that the Committee will not follow the actual treaty its members agreed to join.
Any lingering hope of sanity vanishes with this Committee pronouncement: “A shift away from traditional beliefs that regard early childhood mainly as a period for the socialization of the immature human being towards adult status is required.” Here parades an open admission of the de-civilizing project at hand, whereby the vertical invasion of the barbarians will proceed unchecked and dissolve all societal values in the boundless egoism and narcissism of youth. Once the child is wrenched away from the civilizing and acculturating influence of adults, the path lies open for him to be molded into the deracinated and compliant global subject so craved by the political class.
Quite predictably, President Obama wants to ratify the CRC and portrays the United States' failure to do so as "embarrassing," a statement that reveals far more about him than us.
A more recent arrival to the “human rights” canon is The Convention On The Rights Of The Child (“CRC”), entering into force in 1990. President Clinton signed the CRC in 1995 but never sent it to the Senate, and the CRC remains unratified to this day, leaving the United States with a barebones duty to avoid violating the CRC’s object and purpose (as with the ICESCR and the CEDAW).
For reasons that should be obvious, children occupy a special place in our hearts: their innocence, inexperience, and relative helplessness demand adult care and instruction. Moreover, children represent society’s future, so we share a vested interest in ensuring their healthy upbringing. While the CRC acknowledges these tender mercies, it also plays upon them to pursue objectives that have neither children’s nor society’s interests at heart. Chief among these is to drive a wedge between the child and the family, which outpaces the other “human rights” treaties insofar as they merely alienate the citizen from his nation (a far less intimate relationship). In particular, the CRC places the child in a vacuum by bestowing “rights” that lack any reference or deference to parents, whose views on proper upbringing may well differ from those of diplomats and professors. So we find Article 13(1) of the CRC guaranteeing a child’s freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,” brushing off the right of parents to monitor the pace and content of their children’s education. If, for example, parents wish to postpone their child’s exposure to sensitive topics such as drug use, birth control or homosexuality, they have no choice but to yield to their child’s unquenchable curiosity. This same Article decrees the child’s “freedom of expression,” which subverts timeless parental authority over a child’s speech and deportment. This child-in-a-vacuum dynamic resurfaces in Articles 14(1) and 15(1), consecrating respectively a juvenile “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and “freedom of association and . . . freedom of peaceful assembly,” again obliterating the parents’ control over the ideas and people to which the child may be exposed.
No parenting worthy of the name can take place under these slack conditions, since parenting embodies the affirmative and laborious act of instilling bedrock standards and values into a young mind that is born without them. But when we consider the ideology at play in most “human rights” treaties – whose avowed purpose is to demolish prevailing attitudes and to remake society – it makes perfect sense to sever the link between the old and the young. As foreshadowed by earlier instruments such as the UDHR and the ICESCR, Article 29 of the CRC steps in to fill the generational gap by prescribing universal educational content, commanding that children absorb a proper “respect” for the U.N. Charter and the “natural environment,” along with a non-judging attitude of “understanding” and “tolerance.” So a child may not, it is presumed, scorn the poverty, corruption and cruelty endemic to several of the world’s cultures in the past and the present; instead, the child must learn to become a values-free automaton. Among these various educational dictates, Article 29 ironically recommends preparing children “for responsible life in a free society,” a goal that the CRC and the other “human rights” treaties consistently conspire to defeat with their imperious commands and constraints. To the extent the CRC concedes any parental rights at all, for example in Article 14(2), it is simply “to provide direction to the child in the exercise of his or her right in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child.” Parents may not, in other words, deny any of the child’s “rights” as decreed in the CRC, but rather must cooperate with the CRC to implement them.
The Committee created by the CRC to monitor national compliance has wasted no time in making ominous pronouncements such as this: “The effective promotion of article 29(1) requires the fundamental reworking of curricula to include the various aims of education and the systematic revision of textbooks and other teaching materials and technologies, as well as school policies.” This educational crusade even calls for asserting political control over the media, since “[g]overnments are obligated by the Convention, pursuant to article 17(a), to take all appropriate steps to ‘encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child.’” Parents should not go thinking that they retain disciplinary authority within the confines of the home, since “States parties [must] move quickly to prohibit and eliminate all corporal punishment . . . .” The Committee is undaunted by the fact that the CRC does not specifically prohibit “corporal punishment,” taking a cue from American constitutional lawyers when declaring that “the Convention, like all human rights instruments, must be regarded as a living instrument, whose interpretation develops over time.” This ensures that the Committee will not follow the actual treaty its members agreed to join.
Any lingering hope of sanity vanishes with this Committee pronouncement: “A shift away from traditional beliefs that regard early childhood mainly as a period for the socialization of the immature human being towards adult status is required.” Here parades an open admission of the de-civilizing project at hand, whereby the vertical invasion of the barbarians will proceed unchecked and dissolve all societal values in the boundless egoism and narcissism of youth. Once the child is wrenched away from the civilizing and acculturating influence of adults, the path lies open for him to be molded into the deracinated and compliant global subject so craved by the political class.
Quite predictably, President Obama wants to ratify the CRC and portrays the United States' failure to do so as "embarrassing," a statement that reveals far more about him than us.
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