After the embarrassing failure of the US Senate to ratify the UN treaty on persons with disabilities, various factors were (justifiably) blamed, from obstructionism to xenophobia. But there is another culprit here, which reared its ugly head again, almost imperceptibly and yet devastatingly. Its name? Religion. How was religion involved?
Start with failed GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, who last week used his disabled daughter, Bella, as a political prop, toting her into the Senate to inveigh against the treaty’s supposed attack on parents’ rights. Writing later for the Birther website World Net Daily, for which he is now a paid columnist, Santorum insinuated that the convention invested the UN with Solomonic powers to decide whether his disabled daughter Bella should live or die.
Then, there’s Michael Farris, political mastermind of the Christian home-schooling movement, one of the best-organized and most hardline factions of the religious right. He raised the specter that the UN would prohibit parents from home-schooling their disabled children and even take them from their homes. In fact, the treaty explicitly states, “in no case shall a child be separated from parents on the basis of a disability of either the child or one or both of the parents.”
But most importantly, anti-abortion activists, from Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, to Concerned Women for America and the Susan B Anthony List PAC, charged that the treaty promoted abortion and mobilized to get it voted down. The offending passage came in Article 25, calling for governments:
“[To] provide persons with disabilities with the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable healthcare and programs as provided to other persons, including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programs.”
Perhaps sensing that wasn’t sufficiently terrifying, Perkins claimed the treaty would lead to forced “sterilization or abortion for the disabled – at taxpayer expense.”
Perhaps worth bringing up next times someone gloats about religion helping the poor and needy.
