- Feb 9, 2007
- 1,841
- 25
It's Not Just an Abortion Ban:
The Christian Right's Global Agenda
May 1, 2007
By Yifat Susskind, MADRE Communications Director
http://madre. org/articles/ usfp/christianri ght.5.07. html
After the initial shock of the recent Supreme Court
ruling upholding President Bush's abortion ban, it's
time to acknowledge the full reality of the decision.
According to the American College of Obstetrics and
Gynecologists- -which represents 90 percent of OB/GYNs
in the US--the ruling is harmful to women's health. But
the Court's decision is about much more than a woman's
right to safely end a pregnancy. That's because today's
Supreme Court is a product of the Bush Administration
(newcomer Justices Roberts and Alito tipped the
decision); and the Bush Administration is a product of
the Christian Right. Anyone who has been watching the
Christian Right chip away at abortion access and the
separation of church and state knows that criminalizing
abortion is just the tip of the Christian-
fundamentalist iceberg and that their agenda is global
in scope.
Globalizing the Culture War
Today, Regent, the flagship university of the openly
theocratic wing of the Christian Right, has 150 alumni
working in the Bush Administration. Their alma mater's
mission: to provide "Christian leadership to change the
world." Overturning Roe v. Wade in the US has been
their signature preoccupation, but as missionaries, the
battlefield of the Christian Right is the whole world.
Christian Right activists recognized years ago that
they weren't winning any decisive battles in the
domestic "culture war." But they also noticed that the
mainstream women's movement was largely absent from
foreign policy debates. Compared with domestic
politics, foreign policy was a feminist-free zone--so
the Christian Right moved in.
Since 2000--with one of their own finally in the White
House--religious fundamentalists have turned their
attention to US foreign policy like never before. They
started where all religious fundamentalists start: with
asserting control over women's bodies. For them, the
subordination of women is both a microcosm and a
precondition for the world they want to create. And
everyone knows that a sure-fire way to subordinate
women is to prevent them from controlling their
fertility. After all, when you can't decide whether,
how often, or even with whom to have children, what can
you decide?
That's why the Christian Right's first big payback from
Bush was the reenactment of the "global gag rule,"
which bars organizations that receive US funds from
counseling, referring, or providing information on
abortion. Enacted on Bush's second day in office, the
gag rule has forced not only abortion providers, but
whole clinics to shut down--all of them in the world's
poorest countries, where health services depend on
international aid. The UN estimates that by denying
women access to contraceptives and a range of health
services, Bush's gag rule has led to an additional two
million unwanted pregnancies and more than 75,000
infant and child deaths. Moreover, because there is a
direct link between women's ability to control their
fertility and their capacity to escape poverty, the gag
rule violates a range of social and economic rights, in
addition to women's reproductive rights.
Sanctifying the United Nations
Religious fundamentalism was invented by US Protestants
at the end of the 19th century, but now, there are
powerful fundamentalist movements in Latin America,
Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia
all working to restrict women's rights in the name of
religion. Many of them gained traction during the Cold
War, when the US supported fundamentalist groups as an
antidote to the influence of the Soviet Union and
secular nationalists.
The spread of religious fundamentalism has helped
transform the United Nations from a "Godless
institution" vilified by the Christian Right into an
arena of potential allies, ripe for infiltration. Under
Bush, religious fundamentalists have been appointed to
represent the US at international health and human
rights conferences. They have allied with the Vatican
(which enjoys a quasi-governmental status in the UN),
Iran, and others seeking to unravel and reshape the UN
agenda. As Austin Ruse, president of the US-based
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which
"monitors UN activity" said, "without countries like
Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a
universal human right in a UN document."
Where other countries' allegiance to fundamentalist
values has been thin, US religious fundamentalists have
relied on sheer bullying at the UN. These delegates
have felt doubly empowered--as emissaries of the
world's "only true faith" and its only superpower. Over
the past six years, the unparalleled global economic,
political, and military might of the United States has
enabled Christian fundamentalists to push through
international public health and human rights policies
that have had grave repercussions for women worldwide.
Under Bush, they have succeeded in denying the morning-
after pill to rape survivors in Kosovo and barred
access to condoms and sexual education in AIDS-ravaged
Africa.
Bringing It All Back Home
For the most part, policies such as these did not cost
the Republican Party votes because they didn't impact
women in the US--at least not at first. But the US
attack on women's reproductive rights abroad followed
by the recent Supreme Court ruling is a stark reminder
that ideologically speaking, there's no such thing as
foreign policy. The Christian Right seeks to restrict
women's rights domestically, just as they have
internationally- -as part of one coherent "vision" that
includes much more than a world without abortion.
We only need to look at countries where religious
fundamentalists have gained the upper hand in
policymaking to see where the US Christian Right would
like to take us. Fundamentalists of different religions
draw on different texts and operate in diverse cultures
and contexts. But when it comes to their rigid and
retrograde gender ideology, they show a lot more
commonalities than differences. The Christian Right's
agenda extends to restricting women's rights to work,
equality before the law, education, and freedom from a
range of gender-based human rights abuses, including
domestic battery and marital rape. And the Christian
Right's "vision" goes beyond attacks on any narrowly
construed notion of "women's rights." They're angling
for more of the kind of messianic militarism that
characterized Bush's response to 9/11 (which he
originally called a "crusade"), and more neoliberal
economic policies that promise greater ruin to the
world's poor people and ecology.
Fighting Back
So how do we counter a movement that now has millions
of supporters, and has spent billions building think
tanks, universities, media outlets, and lobbying
machines in pursuit of their agenda?
First, it's going to take more than single-issue
politics based on a narrow reading of reproductive
choice. In many parts of the world, coercive "family
planning" policies that violate women's right to have
children are as much a threat to their reproductive
freedom as lack of abortion access. For people
everywhere, reproductive rights must be linked to
social and economic rights so that every baby has
decent housing, enough food and clean water, a healthy,
peaceful environment, and other rights enshrined in the
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Bush--for all
his pandering about the "rights" of fetuses--is
blocking unanimous global support for that Convention.
(The only other country that refuses to ratify it is
Somalia, which hasn't had a government in 16 years.)
Second, we need to expand our understanding of "women's
issues." The attack on abortion rights is just one
aspect of a religious fundamentalist agenda that is
threatening not only women's freedom, but international
peace and security, Indigenous cultural survival, and
secular, democratic political traditions around the
world. All of these are women's issues. Third, we need
a new progressive dialogue that makes more room for
religious people who are working to counter
fundamentalist agendas, fueled by their own faith-based
politics.
In short, we need a strategy that recognizes the
connections between women's reproductive rights and the
full range of human rights, and between women in the US
and women around the world. It's not that we each need
to be addressing every possible political issue
simultaneously. But wherever our convictions move us to
action, let's act with an awareness of how our piece of
the puzzle fits into a bigger picture of the world
we're working to create. Because while it may seem like
last week's Supreme Court ruling is only about
restricting access to abortion, those who worked for
years to bring it about see the decision as one battle
in a war to remake the whole world in Jerry Falwell's
image.
The Christian Right's Global Agenda
May 1, 2007
By Yifat Susskind, MADRE Communications Director
http://madre. org/articles/ usfp/christianri ght.5.07. html
After the initial shock of the recent Supreme Court
ruling upholding President Bush's abortion ban, it's
time to acknowledge the full reality of the decision.
According to the American College of Obstetrics and
Gynecologists- -which represents 90 percent of OB/GYNs
in the US--the ruling is harmful to women's health. But
the Court's decision is about much more than a woman's
right to safely end a pregnancy. That's because today's
Supreme Court is a product of the Bush Administration
(newcomer Justices Roberts and Alito tipped the
decision); and the Bush Administration is a product of
the Christian Right. Anyone who has been watching the
Christian Right chip away at abortion access and the
separation of church and state knows that criminalizing
abortion is just the tip of the Christian-
fundamentalist iceberg and that their agenda is global
in scope.
Globalizing the Culture War
Today, Regent, the flagship university of the openly
theocratic wing of the Christian Right, has 150 alumni
working in the Bush Administration. Their alma mater's
mission: to provide "Christian leadership to change the
world." Overturning Roe v. Wade in the US has been
their signature preoccupation, but as missionaries, the
battlefield of the Christian Right is the whole world.
Christian Right activists recognized years ago that
they weren't winning any decisive battles in the
domestic "culture war." But they also noticed that the
mainstream women's movement was largely absent from
foreign policy debates. Compared with domestic
politics, foreign policy was a feminist-free zone--so
the Christian Right moved in.
Since 2000--with one of their own finally in the White
House--religious fundamentalists have turned their
attention to US foreign policy like never before. They
started where all religious fundamentalists start: with
asserting control over women's bodies. For them, the
subordination of women is both a microcosm and a
precondition for the world they want to create. And
everyone knows that a sure-fire way to subordinate
women is to prevent them from controlling their
fertility. After all, when you can't decide whether,
how often, or even with whom to have children, what can
you decide?
That's why the Christian Right's first big payback from
Bush was the reenactment of the "global gag rule,"
which bars organizations that receive US funds from
counseling, referring, or providing information on
abortion. Enacted on Bush's second day in office, the
gag rule has forced not only abortion providers, but
whole clinics to shut down--all of them in the world's
poorest countries, where health services depend on
international aid. The UN estimates that by denying
women access to contraceptives and a range of health
services, Bush's gag rule has led to an additional two
million unwanted pregnancies and more than 75,000
infant and child deaths. Moreover, because there is a
direct link between women's ability to control their
fertility and their capacity to escape poverty, the gag
rule violates a range of social and economic rights, in
addition to women's reproductive rights.
Sanctifying the United Nations
Religious fundamentalism was invented by US Protestants
at the end of the 19th century, but now, there are
powerful fundamentalist movements in Latin America,
Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia
all working to restrict women's rights in the name of
religion. Many of them gained traction during the Cold
War, when the US supported fundamentalist groups as an
antidote to the influence of the Soviet Union and
secular nationalists.
The spread of religious fundamentalism has helped
transform the United Nations from a "Godless
institution" vilified by the Christian Right into an
arena of potential allies, ripe for infiltration. Under
Bush, religious fundamentalists have been appointed to
represent the US at international health and human
rights conferences. They have allied with the Vatican
(which enjoys a quasi-governmental status in the UN),
Iran, and others seeking to unravel and reshape the UN
agenda. As Austin Ruse, president of the US-based
Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, which
"monitors UN activity" said, "without countries like
Sudan, abortion would have been recognized as a
universal human right in a UN document."
Where other countries' allegiance to fundamentalist
values has been thin, US religious fundamentalists have
relied on sheer bullying at the UN. These delegates
have felt doubly empowered--as emissaries of the
world's "only true faith" and its only superpower. Over
the past six years, the unparalleled global economic,
political, and military might of the United States has
enabled Christian fundamentalists to push through
international public health and human rights policies
that have had grave repercussions for women worldwide.
Under Bush, they have succeeded in denying the morning-
after pill to rape survivors in Kosovo and barred
access to condoms and sexual education in AIDS-ravaged
Africa.
Bringing It All Back Home
For the most part, policies such as these did not cost
the Republican Party votes because they didn't impact
women in the US--at least not at first. But the US
attack on women's reproductive rights abroad followed
by the recent Supreme Court ruling is a stark reminder
that ideologically speaking, there's no such thing as
foreign policy. The Christian Right seeks to restrict
women's rights domestically, just as they have
internationally- -as part of one coherent "vision" that
includes much more than a world without abortion.
We only need to look at countries where religious
fundamentalists have gained the upper hand in
policymaking to see where the US Christian Right would
like to take us. Fundamentalists of different religions
draw on different texts and operate in diverse cultures
and contexts. But when it comes to their rigid and
retrograde gender ideology, they show a lot more
commonalities than differences. The Christian Right's
agenda extends to restricting women's rights to work,
equality before the law, education, and freedom from a
range of gender-based human rights abuses, including
domestic battery and marital rape. And the Christian
Right's "vision" goes beyond attacks on any narrowly
construed notion of "women's rights." They're angling
for more of the kind of messianic militarism that
characterized Bush's response to 9/11 (which he
originally called a "crusade"), and more neoliberal
economic policies that promise greater ruin to the
world's poor people and ecology.
Fighting Back
So how do we counter a movement that now has millions
of supporters, and has spent billions building think
tanks, universities, media outlets, and lobbying
machines in pursuit of their agenda?
First, it's going to take more than single-issue
politics based on a narrow reading of reproductive
choice. In many parts of the world, coercive "family
planning" policies that violate women's right to have
children are as much a threat to their reproductive
freedom as lack of abortion access. For people
everywhere, reproductive rights must be linked to
social and economic rights so that every baby has
decent housing, enough food and clean water, a healthy,
peaceful environment, and other rights enshrined in the
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Bush--for all
his pandering about the "rights" of fetuses--is
blocking unanimous global support for that Convention.
(The only other country that refuses to ratify it is
Somalia, which hasn't had a government in 16 years.)
Second, we need to expand our understanding of "women's
issues." The attack on abortion rights is just one
aspect of a religious fundamentalist agenda that is
threatening not only women's freedom, but international
peace and security, Indigenous cultural survival, and
secular, democratic political traditions around the
world. All of these are women's issues. Third, we need
a new progressive dialogue that makes more room for
religious people who are working to counter
fundamentalist agendas, fueled by their own faith-based
politics.
In short, we need a strategy that recognizes the
connections between women's reproductive rights and the
full range of human rights, and between women in the US
and women around the world. It's not that we each need
to be addressing every possible political issue
simultaneously. But wherever our convictions move us to
action, let's act with an awareness of how our piece of
the puzzle fits into a bigger picture of the world
we're working to create. Because while it may seem like
last week's Supreme Court ruling is only about
restricting access to abortion, those who worked for
years to bring it about see the decision as one battle
in a war to remake the whole world in Jerry Falwell's
image.
