Obama and UN Join Forces to Assault Parental Rights Worldwide

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Under the guise of fighting “violence against children,” the Obama administration has joined forces with socalist foreign regimes and various United Nations agencies in a “global partnership” to wage war on parental rights. The controversial worldwide initiative, which aims to criminalize spanking and smacking as disciplinary tools, among other things, is part of the UN’s Agenda 2030, also known as the “Sustainable Development Goals.”

Essentially, the UN is betting that framing the assault on families as a bid to end “violence against children” — something nobody in their right mind would oppose — will make it easier to pursue the sidelining of parents. The plan also calls for vast new data-gathering capabilities to ensure children are being raised in accordance with extreme UN standards that were unthinkable even a few years ago. But opponents of the UN agenda argue that the global organization itself is among the lead violators of children’s rights — and parents, by contrast, are the primary protectors of children.

The UN-led attack on parental rights is being marketed as a crucial component of the UN Agenda 2030, a road map to “global governance” and international wealth redistribution that supporters promise will ensnare literally every person on the planet. The global scheme, approved by UN member governments and dictators from around the world last year but not ratified by the U.S. Senate, includes 17 “Sustainable Development Goals,” or SDGs, with 169 specific targets. Among other points, the document, which is being touted as the global “Declaration of Interdependence” by top UN officials, calls for national and global wealth transfers, planet-wide indoctrination of children, and much more. SDG 16.2, meanwhile, calls for ending “all forms of violence against children.”

Ending violence against children sounds like a great goal — at least to people unfamiliar with UN-speak and how deceptive language and terminology are used to advance radical agendas that would get nowhere if explained honestly. And of course, there is real violence against children. Indeed, examples of depravity of all sorts against children by UN “peace” troops abounds all around the world. In just one UN-occupied town in the Ivory Coast, for example, a 2008 survey revealed that eight out of 10 underage girls admitted to be sexually abused and exploited by UN “peace” troops. When whistleblowers expose it, they are mercilessly persecuted by UN bosses. In the case of the UN’s SDGs, though, rather than stopping real violence, the UN is more specifically targeting old-fashioned discipline used by parents, including even mild spankings and smacks.

An analogy might help make sense of the scheming. What the UN is doing, in essence, is the equivalent of starting an organization to combat “marriage (loving discipline of children by parents) and terrorism (real violence and abuse against children).” Terrorism is already a crime everywhere, so there is no need for a global partnership to fight it. But by adding in terrorism to the mission statement, the UN can gain legitimacy for its war on marriage, and attack opponents of the scheme as supporters of terrorism. It might be a good strategy — if humanity was made up of imbeciles. But the scheme is far too transparent to dupe many people, even with the establishment media playing the role of pro-UN propagandist

The UN- and Obama-backed “End Violence Against Children” partnership declares right on the front page of its website that “almost one billion children are subjected to physical punishment on a regular basis.” That means hundreds of millions of parents, maybe billions, are in the UN’s cross-hairs to be criminalized and have their families crushed. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others are all in the UN’s sights. Indeed, many Christians and Jews view the Judeo-Christian Scriptures — “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” in Proverbs, for example — as an obligation to use mild physical discipline to correct disobedient children in a loving way. The UN partnership wants to stamp that out, and openly admits that changing views, behaviors, and traditions — particularly of children — is part of its extremist agenda.

The global alliance of governments, UN agencies, and largely tax-funded “non-governmental organizations” also boasts that it intends to “stop bullying,” and to “end these threats everywhere — in homes, schools, streets and online.” This has become an increasingly frequent theme: The UN and governments need access to your home, the school, and every other place, under some guise or another. Indeed, the UN goes even further, saying in its official press release about the scheme that the agenda includes “tackling behaviors and traditions that further violence, making schools and institutions safe for all children, and strengthening data collection about violence and children, among other efforts.”

In his remarks at the launching of the “Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children,” UN boss Ban Ki Moon, who now describes the outfit he leads as the “Parliament of Humanity,” said “there could be no more meaningful way to help realize the vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” And he is right. A crucial component of the UN agenda involves indoctrinating all children with the UN’s radical views and tracking the results. “Children and young women and men are critical agents of change and will find in the new Goals a platform to channel their infinite capacities for activism into the creation of a better world,” explains the UN agreement, which the brutal Communist Chinese dictatorship boasted of playing a “crucial role” in creating.

The United Nations has understood since its inception that a chief obstacle to tuning your children into UN agenda-supporting “agents of change” is the family unit. And so, Agenda 2030 purports to have the remedy. “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development,” reads the UN Agenda 2030 plan. To anyone familiar with UN speak, in which “human rights” are basically the opposite of God-given rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, for example, and “global citizenship” means exactly what it sounds like, the UN scheme should be causing serious concern.

Top UN officials have made it abundantly clear that they are targeting parents who discipline their children. Even propaganda videos put out by the UN’s Obama-backed “global partnership” make that clear. In one propaganda film posted on the official website for the initiative, Asa Regner, the Swedish “Minister for Children, the Elderly, and Gender Equality,” makes that plain. “Less than 10 percent of children in the world live in countries where laws protect them from all forms of violence,” Regner declares, disgracefully comparing a mild spanking used by loving parents as a disciplinary tool to the very real violence and abuse against children of the sort perpetrated by UN “peace” troops. Like the culturally imperialist government she serves, though, which imagines itself to be superior and wiser than others, Regner wants the whole world and all of the “noble savages” that inhabit it to adopt the extreme policies of Sweden.

Another Swedish anti-spanking crusader featured in the same video declares that “there are other ways of raising children than beating them.” By using the emotionally charged term “beating,” she means to equate actual beating of children, which is and should be a crime in jurisdictions around the world, with the loving physical discipline offered by parents to correct their children, which has been omnipresent in virtually all cultures throughout all of human history. Why she thinks the “new and improved” experimental parenting strategies implemented for the first time in human history by the Swedish government in 1979 should be imposed on all of humanity was not clear, though bigotry against other cultures, religions, worldviews, races, and peoples is a likely factor.

Revealingly, one of the key players behind the Obama- and UN-backed global partnership is actually the Swedish government, the first to destroy families and make loving parents into criminals for disciplining their children. Recently, UN “Violence Against Children” czarina Marta Santos Pais even touted Sweden’s “fabulous initiative” to criminalize traditional parenting — the measure included a total ban on physical discipline and “other humiliating treatment,” along with a tax-funded propaganda campaign to promote government-approved parenting strategies — as a model for the world. Experts, though, have warned that the Swedish law has been an unmitigated disaster that should, in fact, serve as a cautionary tale for other nations around the world on what to avoid like the plague.

“The law ranks all physical punishment of children [such as] a slap on the hand, on the cheek or on the bottom, as assault and battery,” explained attorney Ruby Harrold-Claesson, the president of the Nordic Committee for Human Rights and a strong critic of Sweden’s radical family policies. “Room-arrest is regarded as ‘other humiliating treatment.’” Among other concerns, Harrold-Claesson noted that the law has “resulted in serious interference in people’s family and private lives, and has damaged the relationship between parents and children,” to the detriment of the family as an institution. In the place of parents, government institutions have usurped responsibility over children, in many cases breaking up families, the prominent Swedish lawyer and human-rights activist warned. More than a few parents have also ended up behind bars, with the children dumped in government-run, abuse-prone facilities.

“The law was said to be ‘primarily a valuable pedagogical support in the efforts to convince parents and others that no forms of violence are allowed to be tools in the raising of children,’” added Harrold-Claesson, who has traveled the world warning people about the dangers of Swedish-style attacks on parental rights. “Instead, the law has resulted in hundreds of normal parents being harassed by the police and the social authorities. Some parents have been prosecuted in the Courts, and sentenced and thus been criminalized, because they have smacked — or have allegedly smacked — their misbehaving children.” The internationally known Swedish jurist also said the role of families had been usurped, with government schools and social institutions being given a “monopoly over the children.” Parents are often terrified of their own children under the bizarre system.

Another key player in the UN scheme is UNICEF and its scandal-plagued chief Anthony Lake, who almost took over the Central Intelligence Agency under Bill Clinton until his anti-American radicalism was exposed as a massive security risk by The New American’s senior editor William F. Jasper and others. Lake famously helped overthrow some of America’s most loyal allies so they could be replaced by mass-murdering communist and Islamist regimes — dictatorships that have gone on to murder countless innocent people and even, in the case of Marxist madman Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, perpetrate genocide.

In his new role as self-styled defender of children at the scandal-plagued UN, Lake has been adamant in demanding globalist “solutions” to the alleged threat parents pose to their children. “Violence against children is a problem shared by every society — so the solution must also be shared,” said Lake, who serves as UNICEF boss and founding co-chair of the anti-spanking, anti-parental rights “Global Partnership Board.” “When we protect children from violence we not only prevent individual tragedies and support children’s development and growth. In doing so, we also support the strength and stability of their societies.” By “protecting children from violence,” it must be understood that he means protecting children from their parents — the two people who love their children and care more about them than any other person on the planet.

The World Health Organization, led by Communist Chinese operative Margaret Chan, is also involved in the global attack on parental rights. In a July 12 press release, it boasted of its role, saying it was working to implement and enforce anti-spanking laws such as those imposed by a handful of radical European governments, “criminalizing the violent punishment of children by parents.” The WHO also said it would help “by changing beliefs and behaviours,” in the “provision of training in parenting,” and even by “improving children’s life and social skills.” Among the “collaborators” in the scheme listed in the press release are the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). How much tax funding Americans are providing was not immediately clear.

Family Watch International President Sharon Slater warned about the UN agenda and how it misses the point, saying married biological parents are in fact the best protection children have against violence and other abuse. “Unfortunately, a lot of the initiatives to combat violence overlook the true causes of violence and where most of the violence happens. For example, they overlook that marriage is a strong protector of children,” she said, pointing to studies that show children are far more likely to die if they are not living with their parents. “Parents get a bad rap, they always talk about it happening in the home, but they don’t say what type of home. One of the most dangerous places for a child is a single mother who is cohabiting with a male who is not the biological father. They aren’t identifying the truly dangerous situations for children.”

Slater also warned that the UN and some of the governments involved in the alleged “anti-violence” scheme were actually among the leading threats to the rights of children and parents. “Our big issue — one of the biggest threats to children — is in the name of protecting children’s health, privacy, and so on, you have the Obama administration funding through CDC and other agencies, and UN agencies also pushing, what is called comprehensive sexuality education,” she explained. “They are trying to establish this as a right for children that parents can’t interfere in. They are trying to say that these supposed rights override well-established parental rights, such as the prior right parents have to guide the education of their children. Parental rights are being completely ignored.”

She cited, as just one example of the lunacy, World Health Organization “sexuality standards” used in Europe that recommend teaching children under the age of four that they can touch their bodies for sexual pleasure. The U.S. government and the Obama administration are also aggressively funding radical “sexuality” programs, some of which are guided by abortion giant Planned Parenthood. “These programs claim children have the right to sexual pleasure — even anal and oral sex — and that parents don’t have a right to interfere,” said Slater. “This is one of the greatest assaults on parental rights and the rights of children that we’ve ever seen, and yet it’s being pushed by the UN and others who claim to be concerned about children’s rights. We need to protect the rights of parents.”

Whether or not one agrees with physical discipline is not the real issue here. What is happening is that the UN is trying to destroy hundreds of millions or even billions of families by criminalizing and sidelining loving parents — and replacing them with government- and establishment-controlled actors as the primary influences over children’s upbringing. The internationalists are also dishonestly trying to paint parents as the enemies of their children, and children in caring families as victims who supposedly need protection from their own families by governments and the UN. And the UN and its allies are doing that by equating the loving discipline provided by parents to their children with gross abuses inflicted on children — perhaps most infamously by ruthless UN “peace” troops themselves, repeatedly and systematically, in every country occupied by UN forces. That is an outrage. And it is being funded with U.S. tax dollars.

The UN charter does not authorize any interference in nations’ domestic affairs, much less family affairs. And even if it did, it would be a terrible idea. The totalitarian UN Agenda 2030, meanwhile, has never been ratified by the U.S. Senate as required by the Constitution for all treaties. It is time for Congress to withdraw the U.S. government from the UN by passing the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 1205). With the UN now brazenly attacking parental rights, gun rights, and the Constitution, and even trying to commandeer parenting around the world, the time for an Amexit from the UN is now.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].