Say Anything Blog

I have a big problem with this:

UNITED NATIONS – The Obama administration is reviving efforts to have the United States sign onto a global children’s rights treaty ratified by every U.N. member except the U.S. and Somalia, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said Monday.

Administration officials are actively discussing “when and how it might be possible to join,” Rice, a Cabinet-level official, said while visiting a school in Harlem and fielding a teenager’s specific question about the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

She did not provide a specific timetable for the decision and has said previously only that the administration would conduct a legal review of the treaty.

But during her a brief question-and-answer session with 120 junior high school students at Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit educational facility, Rice acknowledged that the effort was long overdue given that “the only two countries” that are not part of the treaty are the United States and the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

“It’s a long story,” she said of the nearly 20-year-old treaty that has become a point of contention in the United States, not to mention Somalia.

The treaty says children have basic rights to education, health care and protection from abuse. Its supporters have used it to improve child protection laws for schools and courts in places like Lebanon, South Korea, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

My problem with this law is not that I’m against education and health care for children, or protecting children from abuse, but rather that it sets out rights that would apparently be enforced by our federal government that are not in the Constitution.  Meaning that our various sovereign states would be held accountable to law that is not part of this nation’s unifying, founding documents.

If we want to create new rights for children, then let us amend our own Constitution to reflect them.  Because we are a sovereign nation.  Not one ruled by a world government.

Beyond that, creating a right to health care is a bad idea.  Because a right to health care would mandate that the government provide health care.  While some might see that as a good thing, I hardly think that any “right” which makes us more dependent on the government is healthy.

And besides, all of this runs contrary to the very ideals this country was founded upon.  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Liberals, both in American and internationally, love the idea of equal outcomes.  They think that if they create “rights” for things like health care, and then create massive government programs to provide health care so that everyone has access, everything will be great and wonderful.  The problem is that to provide that sort of uniform outcome uniform treatment to a population of individuals must be applied.

This is why America’s founding fathers recognized that equality of outcome is foolish.  Because even within the borders of America we are a big, wildly diverse nation of individuals it only makes sense to create equality of opportunity.  Each person is free to pursue his or her own happiness.  They have no right to demand happiness from the government or their fellow citizens.

Signing on to the Convention on the Rights of the Child would not only give up some of America’s sovereignty and autonomy, but it would also represent a reversal of some of our nation’s founding ideals.