ACLU Celebrates Mother's Day With an Assault on Motherhood: CEDAW

I recently came across a tweet from the ACLU that piqued my curiosity. Could the ACLU be promoting something worthwhile, for once?

"Urge your Senators to stand up for women and mothers in the U.S. and across the globe by ratifying CEDAW!"

Yeah! Let's do it...Sunday is Mother's Day! Let's stand up for Mom, apple pie, the Statue of Liberty and all that good stuff.

The ACLU tweet linked to this page:

Honor Mothers: Tell Your Senators to Ratify the Women’s Rights Treaty

This Mother's Day, let’s honor mothers across the United States by calling on the Senate to finally ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the international treaty dedicated to gender equality. Worldwide, 186 countries have ratified the treaty; the United States is one of only seven countries that have not. The U.S. signed the treaty in 1980, but it has never been ratified by the U.S. Senate.

Ratification of CEDAW would encourage the U.S. to take stronger action on issues such as gender-based and domestic violence, human trafficking, discrimination against women in housing and in the workplace, and could improve access to educational and employment opportunities for women and girls.

Can you believe it? The U.S. is one of only seven countries that hate women—especially moms! The only holdouts are three Islamic states (Iran, Sudan, and Somalia), a few Pacific islands, the Vatican, and . . . the United States.

Worldwide, 186 countries have signed up for CEDAW, a treaty dedicated to promoting prostitution, disparaging stay-at-home mothers, instituting abortion as a "demand right" with unrestricted access for teenagers, and criticizing the observance of Mother's Day. The evil U.S. on the other hand... Wait... What?!

The Heritage Foundation and the AEI provide some enlightening information on the CEDAW agenda:

• Under the auspices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, many CEDAW committee reports urge countries to remove their prohibitions on prostitution and eventually legitimize it.

• The U.N. criticized the republic of Georgia, for example, for "the prevalence of stereotyped roles of women in Government policies, in the family, in public life based on patterns of behavior and attitudes that overemphasize the role of women as mothers." One country report even criticized the observance of Mother's Day.

• Under CEDAW, even private behavior—such as how couples divide household and childcare chores—is subject to government oversight and modification.

• A report to Croatia finds "the refusal, by some hospitals, to provide abortions on the basis of conscientious objection of doctors...[constitutes] an infringement of women's reproductive rights."

• CEDAW would give the activists and lawyers of NCRW, NOW, and the Feminist Majority the license to sue, reeducate, and resocialize their fellow citizens—opportunities that have eluded them under the Constitution.

CDAW is 30 years old now. The document was signed by the second-worst U.S. President of all time, Jimmy Carter, on July 17, 1980. Powerful legislators of both parties have favored it over the years. In 1993, sixty-eight senators, including Republicans Orrin Hatch and John McCain, urged Bill Clinton to secure ratification. Nine years later the Bush administration told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that CEDAW was “generally desirable” and “should be ratified."

Ratification would require 67 votes in the Senate. Senator Barbara Boxer is poised to act.

More

AEI: The UN Women’s Treaty: The Case against Ratification

Examples of U.N. CEDAW Committee rulings reveal how dangerous the treaty would be to Americans.

The prospects for ratification of CEDAW have never been better

Reviving CEDAW