Don’t be tempted to believe that the radical feminists who dream up the Beijing document have retired to their New Age bookstores to sip herbal teal and discuss the “goddess within.” Instead, they are active—planning workshops and lobbying politicians. Pro-family forces hope that a stalled economy drives them back to the bookstores.
Seven months have passed since the Forth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Memories of torrential downpours, rivers of mud and thoroughfares blocked by hundreds of push cars are slowly giving way to more recent recollections of blizzards, whiteouts, and intersections blocked by stalled cars.
But if you’re tempted to believe—even for a moment—that the engineers of the Beijing Platform for Action have quietly filed away their precious 345 paragraph document and retired back to their new age bookstores to sip herbal tea and discuss the ‘goddess within’—think again. To feminists the Platform is an enormous ‘Billy Club’ with which they can beat the pro-family movement. Thus, they are hard at work, promoting it in the press, amongst educational elites, and left-winged organizations. The result is dozens of papers and briefs, meetings and conferences dealing with how to implement Beijing at every level of government.
At the international level, a special Committee has been formed to review all UN programs from a “gender perspective” and to set time limits for the achievement of certain aspects of the Platform. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has hired four new staff and the World Bank has allocated $900 million to education on “reproductive health, population, and AIDS prevention”—in other words—$900 million more will be funnelled into promiscuous sex education and anti-population indoctrination of Third World women.
In may be that the only thing that will slow down implementation at the international level—or any level for that matter—is the current global economic crisis. That this is true was evident when Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali announced in November that due to lack of funds, he was scrapping the new high-level feminist post in his office (a recommendation of the platform).
However, at the Regional level, several blocks of nations have met to discuss implementation and the November meeting of Commonwealth countries in New Zealand birthed a plan to integrate gender considerations into the government programs of a dozen nations. Then there was the Canada/US Health Forum—which was little more then a feminist brainstorming session at taxpayer expense.
At the national level, implementation is going ahead quickly and many countries, like Argentina and Israel have established National Commissions to implement the Platform. Others—such as the Netherlands and Australia have created multi-million dollar documents devoted to its implementation. Since Canada’s radical “Federal Plan for Gender Equality” was created well in advance of the Beijing Conference, it’s difficult to say whether it was simply a precursor of the Platform, or as some have charged a blueprint.
Canadian feminists are touring the country promoting the platform to thousands of unsuspecting students in universities from coast to coast and setting up local, provincial, and national offices from which to coordinate implementation of the Platform.
In Nova Scotia, seven community-based working action groups have been established to implement their own action plans locally, and in Newfoundland a series of public meetings are being sponsored by the Advisory Committee on the Status of Women. Meanwhile, lectures, media interviews, newsletters, and workshops are planned in Quebec, and Ontario feminists are setting up a women’s action database and issuing a report, “Our voices, Our Choices.” The Beijing Network of Manitoba also recently met with the Minister responsible for the Status of Women to demand implementation of the Platform and Alberta’s Women Looking Forward is organizing a similar meeting.
Finally, B.C. feminists have—believe it or not—started working on preparations for the Fifth World Conference in ten years. But what’s truly outrageous is that all of these groups are being centrally co-ordinated by a government-funded “Focal Point office” and 11 other feminist organizations who are also receive government money.
In addition, all federal agencies have been ordered to prepare a “gender analysis” report as part of their budget submission to finance Minister Paul Martin and a new document, “Take Action for Equality, Development, and Peace,” a feminist manifesto on how to implement Beijing at the local, regional, and National levels is being financed by the Feds. Then, there is the infamous Householder Mailing—a package sent to every home in Canada in which the government claimed to have “recognized the importance of strengthening the family” in Beijing. (Somewhat similar to Elizabeth Taylor claiming that she cherishes the sanctity of marriage.) But the package went even further, declaring that women are discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation—leading many unsuspecting members of the public to conclude that the platform embraced sexual orientation.
The front cover of the Canadian Beijing Facilitation Committee’s final newsletter read “It’s now up to all of us to get involved to realise the world we fought for in Beijing:” This is the rallying cry of the Canadian feminist movement. But it should also be the rallying cry of the pro-family movement.
For the world they’re talking about is a lurid conglomeration of Amazon women, castrated men, and those in transition from one sex to another. Imagine a world where the traditional family has been abolished, where abortion is an act of kindness, and sodomy, a badge of honour. Imagine children as ward of the state and no freedom to think or do or worship anything but what they tell you. Imagine this and you have only scratched the surface of what these people have in mind.
Thus, it seems that we have little choice but to continue challenging them—especially on sexual orientation, abortion, and parental rights. Allison Brewer one of the more radial lesbians at the Beijing conference, recently stated her belief that “the Beijing Platform will result in the Human Rights Act to include protection for lesbians and gay men.” That’s exactly what’s happening. Sexual orientation is being smuggled through Parliament as you read this.
Vuyiswa Keyi, of Women’s Health in Women’s Hands, a feminist group responsible for implementing the Health Section, commented during a telephone interview that, “the Platform will be quite useful for rural women because it demands unrestricted access to abortion” and that the “language referring to unrestricted access can be used to back up our call for the criminalization of anti-choice demonstrations.”
Lastly, on the issue of parental rights, feminists are lauding the Government for what they see as a Canadian “breakthrough” in Beijing: Unrestricted access for children to birth control and abortion, without parental knowledge or consent. Pro-family people see this for what it is: a blatant intrusion into the sanctity of their homes and they must defend their families as fervently and as forcefully as they would if a burglar were trying to break down their front door!
In their post-Beijing Report to President Clinton, the U.S. delegation wrote, “Nairobi provided us a compass. Beijing gives us a map.”
A pro-life response to this should be a goal to irrevocably alter the social landscape by knocking down many of the landmarks which feminists have taken for granted for so long now: funding for birth control and abortion clinics, daycare and the feminist lobby. Ironically the pro-life movement’s most powerful allies in this battle will be cost-cutting governments who will not provide the funds to allow the radicals to implement their dreams.
