[Vision2020] Santorum Strikes Again

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 5, 2012
Santorum Strikes Again By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

Lately, you’ve probably been asking: “What ever happened to Rick Santorum?
The guy who ran for president in the sweater vest? The one who compared
homosexuality to bestiality and did 50 push-ups every morning?” It’s
certainly been on my mind.

Santorum is still in there swinging. Lately, he’s been on a crusade against
a dangerous attempt by the United Nations to help disabled people around
the world. This week, he won! The Senate refused to ratify a U.N. treaty on
the subject. The vote, which fell five short of the necessary two-thirds
majority, came right after 89-year-old Bob Dole, the former Republican
leader and disabled war veteran, was wheeled into the chamber to urge
passage.

“We did it,” Santorum tweeted in triumph.

Well, it doesn’t get any better than that.

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.

O.K.

The hard right has a thing about the United Nations. You may remember that
the senator-elect from Texas, Ted Cruz, once railed that a 20-year-old
nonbinding United Nations plan for sustainable development posed a clear
and present threat to American golf courses.

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. But, instead, I will tell
you about own my fears. Every day I take the subway to work, and I use a
fare card that says “subject to applicable tariffs and conditions of use.”
What if one of those conditions is slave labor? Maybe the possibility of me
being grabbed at the turnstile and carted off to a salt mine isn’t in the
specific law, but what if a bureaucrat somewhere in the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority decided to interpret it that way?

No one should have to live in fear of forced labor in the salt mine just
because she bought a fare card at the Times Square subway station! I want
some action on this matter, and I am writing to my senator right away.

But about the U.N. treaty.

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.”

At least some of them were. There would almost certainly have been plenty
of votes to approve the treaty if the Republicans had felt free to think
for themselves. The “no” votes included a senator who had voted for the
treaty in committee, a senator who had sent out a press release supporting
the treaty and a senator who actually voted “aye” and then switched when it
was clear the treaty was going down anyway. Not to mention a lot of really
depressed-looking legislators.

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.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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