var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};Glenn Beck and Rick Santorum today teamed up to attack a UN treaty that protects people with disabilities. Beck claimed it sounds like something “really Orwellian or, quite honestly, fascistic from the Nazi days,” and Santorum wholeheartedly agreed. The radical religious and conservative right has been attacking this UN treaty, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, because of their deep hatred and ignorant mistrust of the United Nations, falsely claiming the treaty would remove rights from parents as to how best raise children with disabilities.
Santorum last week, laying ground for a 2016 presidential run, told reporters he will “do everything†he can “to block†ratification of the treaty.
Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch writes that Beck and Santorum are “lying about what the convention says and means.”
The most amazing thing about this, and the subsequent discussion in which Beck and his co-hosts wildly speculated about what this and other provisions within the convention “really” mean, is the extent to which their complete ignorance about the actual meaning and intent of such provisions in no way hinders their willingness to boldly make declarations about them.
Article 18, Section 2 of the Convention the Rights of Persons with Disabilities says that “children with disabilities shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by their parents.”
While Beck and his cronies were busy laughing about the aburd assertion that children have a right to a name and to acquire a nationality, a bit of research would have taught them that such language is rooted in Article 24 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which entered into force in 1976:
1. Every child shall have, without any discrimination as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, national or social origin, property or birth, the right to such measures of protection as are required by his status as a minor, on the part of his family, society and the State.
2. Every child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have a name.
3. Every child has the right to acquire a nationality.
The main purpose of such rights is to “reduce the danger of abduction, sale of or traffic in children” and “ensure that every child has a nationality when born.”
It’s truly despicable for Santorum and Beck, who both claim to be devout men of God, and for Santorum — who has a three-year old daughter whom this treaty might help — to irresponsibly and ignorantly denounce it.
Listen to Santorum babble on and on about something he clearly does not understand, trying so hard to twist and turn it, and imagine: he could have been president.
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