{UAH} WHERE AMERICAN VALUES ARE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IS WRONG

Where American values are (and have always been) right and the Left is wrong

by Washington Examiner, 

 

July 18, 2020 12:00 AM

 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created a Commission on Unalienable Rights last summer. The idea was to solicit advice from academics, philosophers, and activists about how the United States should approach advancing human rights in a way that is grounded in the founding documents of the nation as well as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This Thursday, the commission released a draft report. It could not have been more timely, for it comes during a period in which protests and riots have broken out across the nation that challenge the very idea that America’s founding was a good thing. In the upside-down view of history, instead of seeing this nation’s founding as something to celebrate, demonstrators see America as evil from its outset.

When the New York Times released its 1619 Project, its lead essay initially contended that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Only after months of objections by historians did the newspaper finally agree to alter the sentence. But the sentiment and the lie upon which it is based still permeate the entire project and is echoed by the rioters' efforts to tear down statues. When Portland protesters tore down a George Washington statue and lit a fire on its head, they also sprayed “1619” on it.

Pompeo, speaking at a launch event for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, said of the motivation behind the project, “They want you to believe that Marxist ideology — that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed. The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology.”

In contrast to the views of the modern Left, this week's report, which was overseen by Harvard legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, promotes the ideas that America’s founding was the most significant beneficial development in the history of human rights and that, in Pompeo’s words, “the Declaration of Independence itself is the most important statement of human rights ever written.”

To be clear, the report does not dismiss those times in American history when the nation failed to live up to its ideals. “Respect for unalienable rights requires forthright acknowledgment of not only where the United States has fallen short of its principles but also special recognition of the sin of slavery — an institution as old as human civilization and our nation’s deepest violation of unalienable rights,” the report reads.

The report acknowledges that we must do better. But it also affirms the important strides that were made in human liberty as a result of the founding. At the same time, subsequent movements, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, ultimately succeeded because oppression of one people was so incompatible with underlying American principles.

The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass came to argue that eliminating slavery was necessary as a result of the founding documents. In his famous speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” Such a speech would be impossible in a country that was not founded by advancing the principles of human liberty.

When the Left attacks the U.S. as somehow inherently evil, it helps other countries continue their atrocities by engaging in “whataboutism.” Indeed, the effort to cast the U.S. as rotten to the core has long been exploited by authoritarian regimes to justify human rights violations. This idea led leftists to be apologists for the atrocities of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War (although immediately after that war was won, they pretended we'd always been on the same side) and is used to ignore human rights violations to this day. Democratic Senate nominee M.J. Hegar of Texas said (stupidly, deceitfully, or both) that because of the Trump administration’s actions on the southern border, “We cannot lecture China on their treatment of the Uyghurs.”

This moral equivalence has crippled efforts to try and fight human rights on the world stage. International organizations meant to police human rights violations have instead coddled the worst violators. In 2018, the U.S. made the correct decision to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is populated by some of the most loathsome regimes on the planet. As the report states, “Charged with addressing human rights violations globally, the Council gave greatly disproportionate attention to Israel while ignoring egregious human rights abuses in many other parts of the world.”

At its core, the report recognizes that only through affirming pride in our nation’s history, while working to do better to live up to our ideals, will the U.S. be able to advocate confidently for human rights around the world.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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