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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSomething Strange from Mike Pompeo
I subscribe to alerts from the US State Department, even during this terrible administration. This is one of the strangest things I have read and it comes from Pompeo. It purports to be about discovering new human rights.
I'd love to get some opinions on what this means.
Unalienable Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Founders Principles Can Help Revitalize Liberal Democracy World-wide
OP-ED
MICHAEL R. POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE
WALL STREET JOURNAL
JULY 7, 2019
Americas Founders defined unalienable rights as including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They designed the Constitution to protect individual dignity and freedom. A moral foreign policy should be grounded in this conception of human rights.
Yet after the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates turned their energy to new categories of rights. These rights often sound noble and just. But when politicians and bureaucrats create new rights, they blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by governments. Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right. Loose talk of rights unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.
Thats why Im launching a Commission on Unalienable Rights at the State Department, chaired by Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon and populated with scholars, legal experts and activists. The commissions mission isnt to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in Americas founding principles.
The commission is an advisory body and wont opine on policy. My hope is that its work will generate a serious debate about human rights that extends across party lines and national borders, similar to the debate sparked by the human-rights panel Eleanor Roosevelt convened in 1947. The Commission on Unalienable Rights will study the document that resulted from that effort, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, along with our founding documents and other important works.
Its members will address basic questions: What are our fundamental freedoms? Why do we have them? Who or what grants these rights? How do we know if a claim of human rights is true? What happens when rights conflict? Should certain categories of rights be inextricably linked to other rights?
This may sound abstract, but the work is urgent. The human-rights cause once united people from disparate nations and cultures in the effort to secure fundamental freedoms and fight evils like Nazism, communism and apartheid. We have lost that focus today. Rights claims are often aimed more at rewarding interest groups and dividing humanity into subgroups.
Oppressive regimes like Iran and Cuba have taken advantage of this cacophonous call for rights, even pretending to be avatars of freedom. No one believed the Soviet call for collective economic and civil rights was really about freedom. But after the Cold War ended, many human-rights advocates adopted the same approach, appealing to contrived rights for political advantage.
The commissions work could also help reorient international institutions specifically tasked to protect human rights, like the United Nations, back to their original missions. Many have embraced and even accelerated the proliferation of rights claimsand all but abandoned serious efforts to protect fundamental freedoms.
Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an industry than a moral compass. And rights talk has become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.
Since my teenage years as a West Point cadet, Ive seen how special the American conception of freedom and human dignity is to the world. I studied the intersection of human rights law and warfare and confronted essential questions about human rights and how best to protect them. These central human questions about unalienable rights have profoundly affected my service as a soldier, lawyer, congressman, Central Intelligence Agency director and secretary of state.
My hope is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better protect essential freedomsand underscore how central these ideas are not only to Americans, but to all of humanity.
I almost wondered if he's trying to totally invert and destroy the meaning of "rights" as has been done with so many words, including "corruption".
msongs
(67,420 posts)sorts of rights are to be gotten rid of
alwaysinasnit
(5,066 posts)many white evangelicals who admit that Jesus was born a middle-eastern Jew. (I do not say this disparagingly.)
FirstLight
(13,360 posts)made such leaps in rights such as LGBTQ, etc...and Bernie says "Healthcare is a Human Right."
So the conservatives are getting nervous and trying to re-frame the term?
milestogo
(16,829 posts)rights to education and health care
So conservatives want rights to hoard wealth, torture others, and commit white collar crimes with impunity...?
FirstLight
(13,360 posts)I think so...thank you for adding to my list, I could not think properly! lol
Garrett78
(10,721 posts)hlthe2b
(102,292 posts)OilemFirchen
(7,143 posts)Just spitballin' here.
GReedDiamond
(5,313 posts)...FUCK Teabagger Pompeo and his Dominionist bullshit.
mia
(8,361 posts)Looks like justification for cutting government programs.
Iliyah
(25,111 posts)He is part of an investigation and he is scared. He mentioned that the Benghazi investigation was "fair" than the Ukraine Investigation. Self pity and he is using a government office as a crutch. This man is sick. Sad.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)It was inexplicably sent out today.
Docreed2003
(16,863 posts)They are going to try to suggest religious rights supplant civil rights. It's crystal clear from the wording in that statement.
Just wait.
handmade34
(22,756 posts)Mary Ann Glendon (the chairman of the newly launched commission) ...is "pro-life and writes forcefully against the expansion of abortion rights."
this is worth looking at further...
the Declaration of Independence mentions "certain" Unalienable rights
this should be interesting and I assume not in a good way
canetoad
(17,169 posts)...
Pompeos definition of unalienable rights draws on the ideas of a legal scholar who has staked her career on making a stark distinction between human rights and womens rights. Mary Ann Glendon is a Harvard Law School professor, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage and abortion. Pompeo has not just drawn on Glendons ideas but also appointed her as the head of the new commission. According to Glendon, Human rights are womens rights.
But it is not the case that whatever a particular nation state decides to call a womans right is necessarily a universal human right.
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/15/how-mike-pompeos-new-commission-unalienable-rights-butchers-history/
milestogo
(16,829 posts)So is she in favor of FGM?
I'll never forget hearing the debate in my college ethics class over female genital mutilation -and hearing my male professor opine that this was a matter of culture and not of rights.
Since then this issue has been reframed as a human rights issue and described as mutilation, and there has been a lot more progress made in stopping it.
SharonClark
(10,014 posts)superpatriotman
(6,249 posts)When you hear these words your rights are about to disappear
mindem
(1,580 posts)and work on fixing our crumbling infrastructure, etc.?
pangaia
(24,324 posts)Everybody here should know exactly what this pile of shit and his pseudo xtians have in mind...
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)https://www.britannica.com/topic/Declaration-of-the-Rights-of-Man-and-of-the-Citizen
Note the date-- we were quite close to France at the time, and our Bill of Rights was submitted in 1989.
And there's always Amnesty International, which is one of many organizations being involved in human rights for years.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)The thing is - the social liberation movements of the 20th century were a matter of making things explicit which were already implicit. Gays, women, and blacks are all human beings whose human rights were not always recognized.
More recently, human rights has been broadened to include things like health care... because its hard to imagine the pursuit of happiness without health, safety, food, and education. To some these things are obvious, to others they are controversial. Go figure.
struggle4progress
(118,295 posts)Julian Borger in Washington
Mon 24 Jun 2019 12.40 EDT
Last modified on Mon 24 Jun 2019 13.45 EDT
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, did not discuss the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a meeting with the Saudi king ...
Pompeo said in a tweet that he had had a productive meeting with King Salman to discuss heightened tensions in the region and the need to promote maritime security in the strait of Hormuz.
Freedom of navigation is paramount, he said. Asked about the slaughter and dismemberment of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October, an unnamed senior state department official travelling with Pompeo told Reuters news agency the subject did not come up ...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/24/saudi-arabia-khashoggi-pompeo-doesnt-raise-during-meeting
"Gosh, I really looked for it! But I just couldn't find anything in the Declaration of Independence against vivisecting journalists"
Mc Mike
(9,114 posts)While working for that supremely religious and holy boss of his.
Sogo
(4,986 posts)Can Republicans Rewrite the Constitution?
BY
BRANKO MARCETIC
A stealth right-wing campaign to call a constitutional convention is perilously close to succeeding. Its goal: repealing the twentieth century.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/gop-constitutional-convention-state-legislatures-balanced-budget-amendment
njhoneybadger
(3,910 posts)Joinfortmill
(14,432 posts)A lot of words that say very little. But my take is a limiting of certain rights and freedoms by redefining the parameters of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Fortunately for our country, he will soon be unemployed.
zaj
(3,433 posts)All rights are invented by humans. Granted by humans. To other humans.
Sometimes we write them down in a Constitution and give them a name like inalienable. Someimes we write them down in a Bible and pretend they are from God.
It's always people agreeing on them.
Western society has started granting a marriage right to gay people. This effort to narrow this back is wrong, in my opinion. But it will work unless enough people decide to keep it.
It's entirely about what we will accept.
Karadeniz
(22,537 posts)Therefore not worthy of legal protections under civil rights laws.
SharonClark
(10,014 posts)Freethinker65
(10,024 posts)Get over it.
That is what these people believe and why they will lie, cheat, and murder, to stay in power.
bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)NCLefty
(3,678 posts)Zambero
(8,964 posts)First and foremost, dehumanize those individuals and groups whose rights you intend to confiscate.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)KentuckyWoman
(6,688 posts)"We'll force women to give birth but once the kid pops out, fuck you. "
I shortened it.