Rick Santorum Versus Those With Disabilities

When not striving to demonize gays or to roll back the right of women to control their own bodies, failed GOP nominee Rick Santorum continues to busy himself pushing Christofascist causes and opposing anything that might recognize the fact that children are not the chattel of their religiously crazed parents.  This latter agenda is the only explanation for Santorum's efforts to convince the U. S. Senate to oppose the united Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  The words that gave Man on Dog Santorum conniptions?  A a section of the Convention on children with disabilities that said: “The best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” With religious extremists like Santorum - who seems to believe that by fathering hoards of children he can convince both himself and the world that he's a macho heterosexual - parental rights to brainwash and indoctrinate their children trump all other rights, including what is best for the child medically and psychologically.  A column in the New York Times looks at Santorum's successful effort to block this worthy Convention.  Here are highlights:

The rejected treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark law Dole co-sponsored. So, as Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts kept pointing out during the debate, this is a treaty to make the rest of the world behave more like the United States. But Santorum was upset about a section on children with disabilities that said: “The best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” 

“This is a direct assault on us and our family!” he said at a press conference in Washington. 

The theory about the treaty on the disabled is that the bit about “best interests of the child” could be translated into laws prohibiting disabled children from being home-schooled. At his press conference, Santorum acknowledged that wasn’t in the cards. But he theorized that someone might use the treaty in a lawsuit “and through the court system begin to deny parents the right to raise their children in conformity with what they believe.” 

If I felt you were actually going to worry about this, I would tell you that the Senate committee that approved the treaty included language specifically forbidding its use in court suits.

In the Capitol this week, disabled Americans lobbied for ratification, arguing, among other things, that it could make life easier for them when they travel. Since more than 125 countries have already signed onto the treaty, there will certainly be pressure to improve accessibility to buses, restrooms and public buildings around the globe. It would be nice if the United States was at the table, trying to make sure the international standards were compatible with the ones our disabled citizens learn to handle here at home. 

But, no, the senators were worried about the home-school movement. Or a boilerplate mention in the treaty of economic, social and cultural rights that Senator Mike Lee of Utah claimed was “part of a march toward socialism.”

The big worry was, of course, offending the Tea Party. The same Tea Party that pounded Mitt Romney into the presidential candidate we came to know and reject over the past election season. The same Tea Party that keeps threatening to wage primaries against incumbents who don’t do what they’re told. The Tea Party who made those threats work so well in the last election that Indiana now has a totally unforeseen Democratic senator. 

The threat the Republicans need to worry about isn’t in the United Nations.

Conservative Christianity in America has become a dangerous sickness that threatens logic, knowledge and the rights and safety of millions of children not to mention others in society targeted or hate and stigma by the self-anointed godly folk.  It is a pestilence that needs to be driven from the public forum and excised from a place of influence on the nations laws.