Catholic League president Bill Donohue has decried a coordinated left-wing attack on the project of the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights in an attempt to downgrade religious freedom and elevate LGBT and “reproductive” rights.
Dozens of international left-wing organizations “recently signed a statement lecturing the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights,” Dr. Donohue noted, including “the Center for Reproductive Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the International Women’s Health Coalition.”
“Their opposition to religious liberty was on grand display,” Donohue said. “In their world, every time religious liberty clashes with abortion rights or the LGBT agenda, the former must bow to the latter.”
Last summer, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo announced the formation of a Commission on Unalienable Rights to provide advice on human rights “grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
One of the key “unalienable” rights is religious freedom, enshrined in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the “free exercise” of religion while prohibiting the establishment of a national religion.
The letter addressed to the Commission on Unalienable Rights says, “we urge the Commission to reject the prioritization of freedom of religion as a cloak to permit violations of the human rights of women, girls, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.”
“The hostility to religious liberty could not be more evident,” Donohue observes. “In their formulation, religious liberty is not a foundational right. No, it is a ‘cloak’ designed to rob people of their newly discovered rights.”
Religious liberty “has long been recognized throughout the world as a foundational right,” Donohue states, and thus it “should never be put on the same moral or legal plane with reproductive or sexual rights” because to do so would “devalue” it.
“This, of course, is exactly what these organizations seek to do,” he notes.
Early on, the letter alleges that a right to abortion is “essential to the realization of fundamental human rights,” including the right to life.
“These sages obviously don’t see the irony in mentioning the right to life in a statement that rejects it,” Donohue observes.
Many of the most prominent organizations attacking religious liberty have a history of bashing religion, especially Catholicism, Donohue notes, beginning with the three organizers.
The George Soros-funded Center for Reproductive Rights has repeatedly attacked the Catholic Church with “venom,” Donohue states, labeling the Holy See “an obstacle to women’s reproductive rights.”
The Soros-funded Human Rights Watch also labels the Holy See as “obstructionist” for standing up for the rights of the unborn, Donohue states.
The International Women’s Health Coalition has opposed the Commission on Unalienable Rights from the outset, alleging that the concept of natural rights and natural law “is rooted in 13th century theology and used anti-rights actors to attack women’s and LGBTQI rights.”
In other words, “these left-wing organizations have long harbored an animus against the Catholic Church,” Donohue declares, and many would have folded were it not for “its atheist-billionaire benefactor, George Soros.”