Calendar: R+ts: International Human R+ts Day is observed Sunday, December 10, this year
.
I would have been cawt unawares had I not noticed that the new Speaker of the House of Representatives USA, Nancy Pelosi. Glad to see she's on the ball in keeping this observance. She says:
"This Sunday, we recognize International Human Rights Day, an opportunity to renew our call to protect and uphold the principles and ideals on which our country was founded. On this day, we must recommit our promise to protect and promote human rights around the world. We must take action to stop the genocide in Darfur, promote human rights in China, and eradicate extreme poverty and disease in the developing world.
"On this meaningful day, we must take time to remember the genocide in Darfur and pledge to redouble our efforts to bring this horror to an end. We cannot stand idly by as the Sudanese government continues its systematic destruction of the people of Darfur. We are compelled by the conscience of the world to put an end to this humanitarian disaster.
"It is fitting that this day also marks the 17th anniversary of his Holiness the Dalai Lama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. The Dalai Lama has made the human rights situation in Tibet an issue of international concern. Under Chinese occupation, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have died and religious and political expressions are severely curtailed. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has asked for international support for his efforts to engage the Chinese government. As global citizens, we must double our efforts to bring freedom to the Chinese and Tibetan people.
"This year the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has declared poverty as one of the gravest human rights challenges of our time. We cannot ignore the inextricable links between poverty and the breakdown of human rights. Access to food, health care, and education, opportunities for income, and freedom from discrimination should be universally known as the most basic human rights.
"On International Human Rights Day we recommit ourselves to protecting and promoting human rights around the world."
Global Horizons> Human R+ts & Poverty
Linking human r+ts to the condition of poverty of so many wordwide will not make it any easier to overcome poverty on that massive scale, and neither will reformational Christian economist Bob Goudzwaard's "norms vs goals" distinction: if the sheer reproductive demograpics of world population is not realistically taken into account. I fawlt both Pelosi and Goudzwaard (and their legions) for not putting first the dire need for stablizing the number of people and working to prevent the expanding number of births on the planet, as a failure that makes all their anti-poverty lamentations trivial.
China's One Child Policy doesn't seem to be any answer for that society's poverty, and the gender imbalance created resultantly by having too many males arriving in the oncoming generations (because of abortion of so many females in utero in China these days) that too has its dark demonic side. China sees the problem but doesnt have a normative answer. But neither is howling against poverty without calling for reduction of number of births in the third world, providing the means to reduce them by birth control a solution to massive world poverty and the advance of human r+ts which suffer along with so much of life for those in a condition of permanent poverty, often lifelong. Markedly valuable in overcoming the world's mass poverty would certainly be the unblocking of acces to condoms in the third world.
This specific move, regarding which Tony Blair has had the courage to challenge the Pope (but only in the fite against AIDs), is an extremely important feature of prevention of overburdening the world with children who will be born into poverty and the vast majority of whom will continue in poverty for the rest of their lives. Use of condoms mass-poverty societies with h+ birthrates is normative. Papal doctrine is wrong, and hurtful, and devastating to the world's poor, especially its Catholics in poverty.
Along with speaking up so clearly for Darfur and Tibet, Speaker Pelosi, a Catholic, and economist Bob Goudzawaard, a Protestant, should be calling on Church, State and the mass populations living and reproducing in stark poverty, calling on them to practice birth control so that the number of poor is not being added to. Otherwise the goals of the UN Millenium Devleopment Goals "are impossible to meet," as a study group of the British Parliament has been reported on Dec8,2k6.
--Politicarp
Further Research:
The Myth of Overpopulation and the Folks who brawt it to you[Catholic Bishops position by Austin Ruse - a most unsatisfactory treatment aimed at abortion, not the condom ban, not poverty]
No comments:
Post a Comment