Lecture 6: Globalizing the Sexual Revolution (Part I)

Draft sixth lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences" Part I: the UN and other IGOs

This is a draft of my sixth lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, to be sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture.

Here I descibe the operations of the United Nations, though the methods and techniques used at the UN are imitated by other “intergovernmental” organizations, like the Organization of American States and the African Union. These opeations are not widely known, but they have a huge impact on people’s lives around the globe. This lecture is taken mostly from my book, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017), part 4. Further details and sources on all this can be found there.

Here is an updated outline of the series as a whole:

General Outline

Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences

Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville

Scope of Lectures:

1. Introduction to the Sexual Revolution

2. Sexual Ideology

3. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:

   Contraception, Abortion, Homosexualiy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues

4. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:

   Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues

5. Exporting the Sexual Revolution: Great Power Foreign Policy, NATO, the European Union

6. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations (Procedures, Sex Education, AIDS, Development Assistance)

7. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution II: Human Rights

8. Opposition to the Sexual Revolution

9. Effects of the Sexual Revolution

10. Responding to the Sexual Revolution

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Lesson 6

Globalizing the Sexual Revolution

Part I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations

Source Texts:

• Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (Angelico, 2017), part four.

• Kathryn Balmforth, “Hijacking Human Rights,” speech delivered at the World Congress of Families, 14-17 November 1999

• Maciej Golubiewski, Europe’s Social Agenda (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, 2008, http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.278/pub_detail.asp)

• Douglas Silva, The United Nations Children’s Fund: Women or Children First? (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, 2003, https://c-fam.org/white_paper/united-nations-childrens-fund-women-or-children-first/)

• Doris Buss and Didi Herman, Globalizing Family Values (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

• Edward Green, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment Has Betrayed the Developing World (PoliPoint Press, 2011)

Further Readings:

• Sharon Slater, Stand for the Family (Inglestone, 2009)

• Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom (Angelico, 2015)

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6

Globalizing the Sexual Revolution

Part I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations

This lecture will focus mostly on the role of the United Nations. But the operations and procedures I describe here are also used, in varying degrees, by other intergovernmental organizations: the Council of Europe, Organizations of American States, African Union, and others. Here I will describe the overall operations and procedures of the UN on sexuality, and describe a few specific programs. But much of UN’s contribution to the Sexual Revolution involves “human rights”, and I will save this for the next lecture

United Nations

Critics of the UN dismiss it as ineffectual for its failures to preserve global peace. Yet meanwhile, UN operatives are active in promoting the Sexual Revolution. Two scholars write that feminists “have turned the United Nations…into the global headquarters of feminist missionaries.” In UN documents, “‘peace’, ‘justice,’ and ‘development’ are linked over and over again with women.”

Some 1,300 “gender focal points” exist to address “women” or “gender” in the UN system. Its agencies are required to incorporate sexual ideology (“gender perspective”) “in all policies and programs.” Hundreds of offices and officials are devoted to the “promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.” Not a single such agency exists for men (or for families that include men), despite the fact that men are the overwhelming majority of war casualties, AIDS victims, victims of occupational injuries and deaths, prisoners, and more.

Proceedings, Meetings, and Conferences

The UN has devoted some six major international conferences to women, far more than on any other topic. These taxpayer-funded “conferences” are closed to the public and press. The outcomes are a foregone conclusion, since they are organized, controlled, and dominated throughout by feminists, who marginalize anyone who disagrees with them. The manifestos they finalize are already drafted by feminists. Feminists receive favored treatment in events and official meetings from which their opponents are excluded. T wo feminist scholars write that opponents must “counter UN bureaucracy and unfair treatment used to keep them out of important UN meetings.” Many governments include “feminists on state delegations sent to UN conferences and meetings, thus giving some feminists access to negotiation sessions from which NGOs are otherwise unrepresented.” Opponents claim “unfair negotiating procedures, deliberately designed to place the more socially conservative countries at a disadvantage”. Kathryn Balmforth describes “stacking of the deck,” when “the Secretariat – which is supposed to be neutral — presents documents for negotiation which are heavily skewed toward the anti-family ideology”.

Feminists exert “economic and other pressure on developing countries, forcing them to drop opposition to the anti-family agenda.” “Special interest groups can claim seats on national delegations, from which they negotiate documents calling for more money and power to be given to themselves.” Feminist pressure groups even upstage official delegations of poorer countries. “Some UN delegates …remain standing even though NGO representatives, who are supposed to be observers, had prominent places at the table.”

Wealthy nations with feminist agendas use their muscle to push aside smaller and poorer developing countries, who are much less sympathetic to radical sexual changes.

The UN chooses and vets the groups it permits to lobby itself. Over 3,000 such organizations have accredited consultative status. “Only about 20 work…to protect the family, and…only a small number [of those] regularly participate.”

UNICEF (the UN Children’s Fund) exemplifies the UN’s transformation from humanitarian charity to ideological lobby. It “consciously and consistently embrace[s] a newly dominant ideology…of radical feminism” writes Douglas Silva. “The intellectual and philosophical underpinning for this transformation was radical feminism.” UNICEF was politicized by feminist-driven programs to “protect” children not from specific health risks but from ill-defined “violence, exploitation, abuse, and discrimination” and from their own parents. It demands that re-education and behavior-modification techniques be imposed not only on public institutions but also private households. Predictably, “Fathers are mentioned as perpetrators of gender bias and discrimination, and therefore in need of re-education or re-socialization.”

Attempts to officially introduce homosexual politics at the UN are frustrated by nations from the global South, with mostly traditional values. No binding UN document has ever recognized “sexual orientation” as a human right, and homosexuality has never been made a protected category. Yet under feminist tutelage, homosexualists have adopted similar high-pressure methods,. “The issue has gone from relative obscurity to human rights primacy,” writes one observer. “A radical shift has taken place at the UN, leading to the first ever resolution being adopted on ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ in 2011.”

Sex Education

The UN aggressively promotes “sexuality education”, though this term understates what is involved. Sex education is not limited to sexual facts or techniques. It also includes indoctrinating children in sexual political ideology. As one “expert” explains, “Sex education is not the mere abolition of technical ignorance, but a link in the mechanism of changing society.” According to UN guidelines, “age appropriate” instruction includes:

• From age 5, children must be taught to reject “gender roles” and “stereotypes.”

• Beginning at age 9, they are to believe that “gender role stereotypes contribute to forced sexual activity and sexual abuse.” (How precisely this is true is not explained.)

• At age 15, children must be recruited into active participation in “advocacy” campaigns and promoting political agendas, including “advocacy to promote the right to and access to safe abortion.”

One justification for the UN’s foray into this contentious topic (which is considered by some to be a private matter) is the unreliability of parents to fulfill their responsibility to educate their children adequately in sexuality. In fact, sex education also aims to undermine parental authority. Among the “key stakeholders” in this education, no mention is made in UN documents of parents, who are repeatedly dismissed for their multiple inadequacies and failures.

AIDS

The Sexual Revolution brought especially unfortunate consequences during the AIDS epidemic. One health official writes that, because of (what he calls) “pro-sex ideology”, “AIDS has become the most politicized disease in the annals of public health.” Edward Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard School of Health, calls AIDS “the greatest avoidable epidemic in history.”

When AIDS appeared, African countries like Uganda (where the epidemic was most acute) responded with successful and low-cost campaigns based on principles of sexual restraint: delaying sex, abstinence, and fidelity, all with involvement from religious leaders. The result was a dramatic reduction in the disease.

But sexual radicals, driven by what Green himself calls “the ideology of sexual freedom”, found this response threatening to their agenda of sexual liberation. They therefore deliberately undermined it with more “sex-positive” (their term) programs based entirely on a single method: distributing condoms. “This approach was the most egregious backfire in the history of public health,” writes Green, leading to “a global disaster of epic proportions”, with millions of deaths in Africa and elsewhere.

Sexual activists politicized the disease and used it to procure funds by using “wide-eyed babies and violated wives as bait [to] “bundle AIDS with women’s emancipation, sexual liberation, and poverty eradication.” The Open Society Institute campaigned to “put legal and human rights protections at the center of HIV effort” and insisted that “Responding to gender inequality is especially crucial for effective prevention.” They did not explain what “gender equality” has to do with preventing AIDS. Contrary to the claims of sexual radicals, Green writes that “There is no credible evidence that gender inequality, poverty, discrimination, stigma, war and civil disturbances, racism, or homophobia actual drive HIV epidemics in Africa.”

Poverty and Development

Since the founding of the UN, economic development assistance to poorer countries of the global South has been one of its most visible activities. In recent decades, this too has been dominated by feminist and homosexualist ideology.

As one Nigerian diplomat says, “Right now every issue…every discussion reduces the problem of Africa just to sexual orientation.”

Until the 1990s, the literature on economic development had been dominated by quasi-Marxist principles. Global poverty was explained by neo-Leninist theories of imperialism, colonialism, “dependency,” and so forth. These theories blamed failure to develop on exploitation by the capitalist West. In the event, these theories themselves left little in their wake but devastation: not only continued impoverishment but corruption, bureaucracy, mass displacement, political instability, and endless wars of insurgency and counter-insurgency.

The collapse of European Communism – along with the depravity of the regimes it had sponsored in the underdeveloped world – rendered these theories discredited. But they were then replaced by feminist claims that blame underdevelopment on various ill-defined exploiters of women. This turned development aid into a kind of global welfare that creates in the global South, as it does in the West, huge populations of dependent single-parent homes. Strikingly similar to its domestic equivalent, this international welfare claims to help impoverished “families” but in fact it prolongs and entrenches their poverty. “Humanitarian responses,” writes one advocate, “…can be compared to the emergence of social work in domestic politics.”

Even before being politicized by feminists, development aid was harshly criticized by economists and others who argued that it does more harm than good and leaves little in its wake but continued poverty, disease, social pathology, corruption, dictatorship, and war. Feminization gave international aid a new lease on life and rendered it – like the feminization of domestic welfare – largely immune from criticism.

Numerous UN-affiliated organizations sprung up to administer aid programs. Though advertising themselves as “charities”, they are really political lobbies. They do not provide food and medicine; they promote political activism. One group, describing itself as a “charity” for Africa, “fights for environmental justice, children’s and women’s rights, land and housing rights, and the rights of those living with HIV/AIDS through support of public interest law and legal education.” Though never disclosed, the vast bulk of cases handled by such “legal services” are divorce and child custody cases. They dissolve families and remove fathers, thus increasing the hardships to children and the need for their own “services.” Yet this is sold to the public and to donors as a “charity” that somehow promotes “development.”

As with domestic welfare, the aim is to separate the women and children as objects of permanent relief, to marginalize and eliminate the male earners, to dissolve the families that could actually build prosperous and self-sufficient societies, and make the societies permanently dependent on foreign aid workers, advocacy organizations, lawyers, foreign governments, and international organizations. UNICEF is explicit that its role is to subsidize women and girls economically, not to assist and strengthen their families as a whole but to separate them from their male family members: “Education can…provide vocational skills, potentially increasing her economic power, thus freeing her from dependence on her husband, father, or brother.”

Throughout UN literature, “families” means single mothers and fatherless children, and “helping families” means depriving children of the fathers and the family lives that would build the family wealth and inculcate the work ethic they need to escape poverty. In all these organizations, men and fathers are marginalized, excluded, sometimes demonized, and replaced by aid organizations and government officials—in effect, global social workers.

Thus the poverty continues, because the UN and its “NGO” adjuncts trap children in poverty and make them permanently dependent, generation after generation, on the West’s professional humanitarians whose livelihoods depend on an endless supply of impoverished clients.

The poor – and poor children in particular – are held as moral hostages and used as what one scholar calls “mutilated beggars” – comparable to the physical mutilation of children common in poor countries and designed to make them more pitiable and therefore more effective panhandlers. Handouts to their mothers encourage the moral mutilation of more children.

One group brags that its “economic development programs assist impoverished families by supporting moneymaking activities, especially those operated by women.” But “moneymaking” schemes are not development; they are welfare couched in terms of business. Families are what create wealth and pass it on to the next generation, which is the basis of economic prosperity. This is how the West developed. But the aid agenda is devoted to undermining precisely this process and replacing families with international bureaucracies and patronage networks of social workers and other government officials: what the UN describes as “governments and partner organizations at many levels”.

As I noted earlier, the Sexual Revolution also includes imported Western divorce laws and domestic “violence” programs, pushed by free “legal services”, which Western feminists have been assiduously proselytizing to the global South via aid groups. This augments the economic leverage and further ensures that women and girls do not live in families with fathers and husbands. Predictably, this traps them in dependent poverty, much as welfare does in the West.

In the next lecture, I will discuss the large topic of human rights, as operated by both the UN and other intergovernmental organizations.

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If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.