This is absolutely astounding. From this year's session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women: "The American delegation joined with Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya and others in efforts to delete a phrase - included in previously agreed-upon UN statements dating back a decade - that calls on countries to condemn violence against women and "refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious consideration" to avoid the obligation to stop the violence."

I think the really jaw-dropping bit, though, is here:

"For too long, the feminists have been pushing a radical, special-interest agenda under the erroneous mantra made rhetorical cliche by Hillary Clinton: 'Women's rights are human rights,'" writes Janice Crouse, an official of the conservative group Concerned Women for America and a member of the U.S. delegation.

Is this another one of those neo-conservative bugaboos that I don't get because I'm not in the AEI loop? A Google search didn't turn up anything. But, um, aren't women's rights human rights, sort of by definition? The CWFA seems to interpret it as being primarily a pro-abortion phrase, but clearly it's not meant this way in the context of the UN commission, which seeks a lot of things, ending violence against women probably paramount among them.

But see, this is what I've been saying, guys: these people are way, way out of the mainstream, and that means they've very vulnerable. And what I mean by that is that you don't have to try too hard to nail 'em--you don't have to get really worked up and self-righeous and paint things in these all-or-nothing terms. When they're endorsing violence against women, you can get a lot of good material out of that. Just keep cool. Less about "the mysogonistic violence of these male chauvanist pigs," less about the hypocracy of their foreign policy, and more about their disregard for human rights, their endorsement of suffering, etc., and our committment to trying to stop women from being tortured and killed.

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posted by Mike B. at 1:21 PM 0 comments