For children to be free, mothers must first break free from superstition and dogma

A major roadblock to elevating children’s rights over parental authority is the conservative refusal to modify their position on gender roles, and to discard worn out family stereotypes. The religious nuclear family with father at the head, an obedient wife trailing behind, and well behaved self controlled children is their ideal. Women in the US, Western Europe and other enlightened countries have managed to pry the grasping hands of backwards patriarchal men loose to some degree, but in places like Africa,
South Asia, and the Middle East, patriarchal systems are alive, well, and doing great damage to women and children. Consistently, justifications for the status quo reside in religious practices and cultural
norms, which are held sacrosanct, immutable. Parents free exercise of religion trumps children’s human rights.

In tracing where religious freedom is cited as a justification to maintain absolute control over childhood religious indoctrination my research has taken many turns. Most recently I have focused on International conventions and treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which 147 nations ratified, but Somalia and the United States did not) the CCIPR, (which the United States signed, but added stipulations that essentially make selected provisions worthless within our borders) and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) I have to research the status of this convention’s adoption by the US, but I suspect it has no status either because of conservative objections. I was led to the UN conventions by the work of Innaiah Narisetti, the CFI/India Chair and a proponent of child rights. His paper is on Dawkins.net.

How is resistance to child’s rights articulated? Well, there is no better place to discern the thinking of conservatives than their think tanks. I started with The Heritage Foundation and came up with this long critique of the UN approach to bringing women and children out of the dark ages and free of the bondage of religion and tribal oppression.

http://tinyurl.com/2eg6nm

The following are brief excerpts to give you a flavor of the paper:

Yet, on the issue of women’s and children’s rights, the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights has permitted committees and agents under the U.N. umbrella to turn these principles on their head as they communicate with the signatories of the CRC and CEDAW treaties. These agents are targeting patterns of behavior and social norms that have had the greatest positive effects on society and the individual: marriage, motherhood and fatherhood, caring for children in the family, chastity, and the special role of religion. They have asked nations to change their domestic laws in ways that ultimately will promote sexual activity among adolescents, increase abortion and legitimize prostitution, and in general alter the
foundations of society. The sexual norms they promote, moreover, are primarily those sought by radical feminists. They are becoming the tenets of a new “moral” code against which all religions, domestic policies, and cultures would be judged.

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