Don Feder

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Church and mosque unite in Geneva

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- GENEVA -- When your opponents uncork a vintage whine, you know you're doing something right.

The World Congress of Families, which recently met in Geneva has come under fire from those who are using the United Nations to deconstruct the traditional family.

In The Guardian, Britain's premier leftist rag, Gordon Urquhart warns of "a new and potentially dangerous form of interfaith collaboration."

Why, there are evangelicals and Moslems, Mormons and Catholics coalescing in the city of Calvin, Urquhart frets. This, he explains, is the latest phase of a partnership begun at the U.N.'s 1994 population conference in Cairo, when the Vatican enlisted the aid of Islamic states to block the march of progress -- i.e., population control by any means necessary.

Urquhart notes that Cardinal Lopez Trujillo ("one of John Paul II's right-hand men") addressed the multi-faith gathering. The conspirators are "united not only by moral principles but also by the fundamentalist rejection of separation between church and state; they are therefore committed to imposing their views by political means."

They are committed to defending themselves against those who would impose their bizarre views of the family, sexuality and procreation on faith communities.

By the way, when was liberalism's First Amendment distortion internationalized? In the U.N.'s charter, where does it say the religious must be mute in international policy-making? After all, the Vatican does have official U.N. status.

Urquhart chides the Geneva conferees. How dare they attempt what his side has been doing so successfully for the past 20 years -- networking and forming alliances to pursue common goals?

In league with U.N. bureaucrats, leftist NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are busy bees. Groups like the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and the Women's Environmental and Development Organization (founded by the late Bella Abzug) have relentlessly pursued their agenda from Istanbul to Beijing.

This spring, Cairo Plus Five, the follow-up to the Cairo Conference -- which considered ways to cure the "epidemic of childbearing among married women" (in the words of Filipino Sen. Francisco Tatad) -- convened in Manhattan. More than 60 of the delegates were members of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. While ostensibly representing their nations, all of their expenses were covered by IPPF.

Dr. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, praises the work of anti-family NGOs. ("They have the flexibility to act in areas where governments are not able or willing to act, because of political sensitivity or logistical obstacles.") This is especially true in Third World countries, where they labor to legalize abortion and promote contraception.

At U.N. conferences, they have successfully pushed resolutions promoting same-sex marriage, condemning bans on abortion as "forced pregnancy" (and, as such, a crime against humanity), advancing the abolition of gender roles in marriage, and demanding that children as young as 10 receive "comprehensive training in sexual expression, sexual pleasure and sexual orientation" (parental interference here would be classified as child abuse).

In the face of this coordinated assault by a well-oiled machine, over 1,500 delegates from more than 50 countries convened in Geneva earlier this month. Besides Trujillo, delegates heard from the widow of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the head of the Mormon relief society, Nicaragua's minister for the family, and a host of scholars, legislators and activists. The late Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, was slated to speak but had to withdraw due to a scheduling conflict.

Margaret Ogola of Kenya, a physician who runs a hospice for HIV-positive orphans, described the world the other side has created, a world in which "sex is no longer seen as a wonderful and sacred gift; nor the power to beget children as anything very special."

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and a member of the WCF planning committee, believes a bloc of 12 Catholic and Muslim states, working in unison, could check anything feminists and population cops try to impose on families.

People like Urquhart should worry, Ruse confesses. "We're determined to do everything they're doing at the United Nations." Amen, brother, and Allah be praised.

JWR contributing columnist Don Feder's latest book is Who's Afraid of the Religious Right. Comment on his column by clicking here.