To most Americans, rights are rights, and all have equal weight and apply to all Americans. But the Trump administration does not believe that. They don't care about Supreme Court rulings when they don't agree with them, and they have issued a new report from a very partisan committee that tells Americans that some rights are more important than others.
Here is part of an article on this troubling report by Dan Spinelli in Mother Jones:
Last July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched an advisory panel to help the US practice “a moral foreign policy … grounded in [a] conception of human rights.” Crucially, its mission, Pompeo explained, would include reining in a dangerous proliferation of “new” human rights. “Unalienable rights are by nature universal. Not everything good, or everything granted by a government, can be a universal right,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining the formation of this Commission on Unalienable Rights. “Loose talk of ‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”
It didn’t take long for human rights experts to read between the lines. Pompeo, whose leadership of the State Department has become in many ways an experiment in how quickly he can orient American foreign policy toward his evangelical Christian faith, stocked the commission with academics and diplomats best known for defending religious freedom while opposing reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality.
On Thursday, the commission finally unveiled a draft of its long-anticipated report, finding—surprise, surprise—just what Pompeo suggested in his initial op-ed: not all rights are created equal. Describing a human rights landscape “in crisis,” the report focuses mainly on the Declaration of Independence and Universal Declaration of Human Rights and mostly ignores the binding treaties establishing a framework for international human rights law. The problem, as the commissioners see it, is that a proliferation of new rights include many in competition with one another, which has eroded the international consensus around human rights. The solution, then, is to boost protections of certain rights, particularly religious freedom, while diminishing others.
“As anticipated, the report elevates religious freedom as an unalienable right, while dismissing abortion and same-sex marriages as not rights but instead ‘divisive social and political controversies,'” Jayne Huckerby, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Duke Law School, tells me. She notes that the report “recognizes that legally there should be no hierarchy between different types of rights,” but “still calls for US foreign policy to de-emphasize economic and social rights compared with civil and political ones.”
In practice, that has already started to happen. With Pompeo leading from Foggy Bottom, the United States has renounced its role as a leader in promoting LGBTQ equality and reproductive rights abroad, most prominently in Trump’s expansion of the so-called global gag rule, which restricts which nongovernmental organizations can receive US aid based on whether they perform any abortion-related activities. US diplomats have teamed up with countries with abominable records on these issues—Saudi Arabia and Brazil among them—to oppose international agreements aimed at preserving those rights. When Trump appeared at the United Nations General Assembly last year, he chose to host an event focused on religious freedom. And, while his administration regularly attempts to cut back on international aid, the president still recently signed an executive order giving $50 million to support international religious freedom.
“This administration practices consistent and continued erasure of LGBTQ people and refuses to acknowledge that access to reproductive health care is essential for survival,” says Molly Bangs, director of reproductive rights advocacy group Equity Forward. “LGBTQ people face threats to their health, safety, and civil rights here at home and around the globe and this report makes zero mention of protecting their rights.”
