Why is the UN promoting the acceptance of prostitution and homelessness?
Also, why is it trying to make "international human rights law" trump local criminal law?
Warning: this post is rated R for language and adult themes.
Last week my social media was full of conservatives raising alarm bells about a recent United Nations report that, they claimed, aimed to normalise pedophilia.
I had to check this out for myself.
I’m not, and never have been, a big believer in the United Nations. Quite the contrary. For a number of years, when I was a kid, my mother worked as a secretary at the UN in New York, and she experienced a kind of neo-colonial elitism where the bosses would treat the lower-class staff with contempt while swanning from one long lunch to another. Later, when I studied foreign relations, the organisation seemed pointless, corrupt and foolish. But I never thought of it as malevolent.
It can be hard to discern sometimes where foolish ends and malevolence begins. This March 8 report is one of the those times.
After reading it, I thought the conservatives were slightly overstating the case about minors. It did not state that adults should be allowed to have sex with children, only stating that “sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual.” And under very narrow, specific, and context-dependent circumstances — none of which are delineated in the report — this may be true. But in this current climate, where so, so many adults have lost all decorum and dignity and our longstanding human boundaries are being worn away, it is mind-boggling that the UN wants to wade into this territory. Aren’t there wells that need built somewhere?
For me, the most alarming thing was its clear aim to supersede criminal laws — globally— with international human rights law. I mean, are they trying to prove Alex Jones right??
Here’s just one short example:
“Criminal law may not, on its face or as applied, in substance or in form, directly or indirectly discriminate on any, including multiple or intersecting, grounds prohibited by international human rights law.”
What on earth does that mean? I’m not a lawyer, but I do speak English, and that sentence is very open to a variety of interpretations. And I don’t like any of them. These people live in cloud cuckoo land.
So on the heels of the Covid disaster and the WHO’s, uh, dubious, role in that, the UN thinks it’s wise to put out a document that implies a mass deletion of criminal penalties for drugs and prostitution? As our social media feeds fill up with images of tent cities that have taken over metropolises that were once pinnacles of civilisation, we are supposed to be more tolerant of addicts shitting on the streets?
“No one may be held criminally liable…for engaging in life-sustaining activities in public places, such as sleeping, eating, preparing food, washing clothes, sitting or performing hygiene-related activities including washing, urinating and defecating.”
Read the room guys.
The report’s Principle 17 gives a blanket green light to prostitution: “The exchange of sexual services between consenting adults for money, goods, services…may not be criminalised.” And neither shall the pimps be inconvenienced by annoying local laws! “Criminal law may not proscribe the conduct of third parties who, directly or indirectly, for receipt of a financial or material benefit, under fair conditions…facilitate, manage, organise…provide or rent premises…for the purpose of the exchange of sexual services between consenting adults.”
Forgive my cynicism, but the little caveats about “coercion, force, abuse” don’t do it for me. Who is policing that, absent local criminal legal authority? The March 8 principles don’t bother to go into detail. They just sweep away local powers because it sounds nice.
I’m sure this report has absolutely nothing to do with the many accusations of child sex abuse and trafficking levelled against UN peacekeepers in multiple countries.
Never mind the thorny issue of just how, exactly, a global body like the UN could possibly supplant local lawmaking, local law enforcement and local cultural custom. The report is totally devoid of anything that is a not wildly sweeping pronouncement. It has zero specifics of any kind. Kind of like the Beach Boys song Wouldn’t It be Nice, but about crime and prostitution and sexual morality.
My main point is this : we do not need more sexual permissiveness and acceptance of drug addiction. We need less. I do not speak for African nations, or Central Asian nations, or anywhere that has a far more restrictive sexual culture than we do. Ultimately, I feel that is their business and I don’t want American or Australian or Canadian libtards telling people in other countries that they must embrace kids having two daddies. Almost everyone who has travelled to third world countries has seen flourishing sex trades that are fuelled by terrible poverty, not the fact that 10 year old Cambodians think getting banged by fat white dudes is empowering. Those horrible, complex problems are not even slightly addressed by this ridiculous report.
To read this report, you would think that in the West we were still partying like it’s 1959.
In reality, we are living through an unprecedented openness that has gone way too far. Suddenly, almost every news story seems to somehow connect back to sexual practices that even in the 1970’s, ’80’s and ’90’s were simply not mentioned in public discourse. I’m old enough to remember when high level government official were serious people wearing grey suits and talking about policy papers. Today we have thieving crossdressers and gay leather daddies with pentagram tattoos, supposedly making policy on nuclear warheads and monkeypox! Pervs have always existed, sure. But they used to keep that shit private. Let’s make fetishes private again. They are not job qualifications.
Even more sinister is the frequent appearance of children and young people.
From the teens-should-use-Grindr PhD thesis of Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety (lol) at Twitter; to Paul Pelosi’s attacker and his daughter’s claims that he sexually abused her and her siblings; to the man shot by Kyle Rittenhouse back in 2020 and his child rape conviction. I can’t help but notice how many stories in our news cycle have some connection to lurid, sordid, and often criminal sex.
There is a place for a healthy openness about sex, including with teenagers over a certain age, say 16 or 17.
But that’s not what we have right now. And that’s not what the report is implying.
Becoming an adult means learning to control your impulses and compartmentalise. If adults are thinking about sex all the time, then there isn’t much room left in to think about other things, things that require analysis, judiciousness and clear thinking. You become addled. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
Those of us lucky enough to exist in the luxurious west need a recalibration of our attitudes toward sex. Indulgence of every possible kind has clearly made our elites stupid (or malevolent?) In our current climate, it’s hard to see how this report was needed in any way, except to further saturate an already sex-addled society. But this time, on a global scale.
I’m all for consenting adults doing what they want in the privacy of their bedrooms, but the licentiousness on public display, the upending of hard science, and sexual quirkiness as a resume point, are all mind-boggling to me. I feel as though there’s not a normal place left to which I could even escape.
I don't know how many times the "crazy conspiracy theories" have to be proven right (not only proven right, but realized to be mere hints at the actual depraved authoritarian evil that's spreading through the world.) Such an incredibly effective game - just label things "right wing conspiracies" or "nothingburgers" and voila - carte blanche to do limitless damage in the name of sick personal strokes (ego or otherwise.)
As is ALWAYS true, the most vulnerable will take the brunt - and that always means children. (It often includes other people as well, but it always includes children.) The twisted up-is-down language strategy is somehow still accepted - the "caring, harm-reductionist, equity-loving" elite authoritarian "Progresssives" *somehow* end up wreaking the most grievous destruction worldwide.
They demand "green" technologies that are entirely dependent on torturing and poisoning Congolese child cobalt miners, they demand abortion policies that support snipping the spinal cords of healthy halfway-newborns, they "magnanimously" grant "rights of consent" to children who have been convinced they need to be sterilized and/or raped (depending on where in the world they live) because it's in their own best interests - "they'll kill themselves otherwise" or "love isn't limited by age" or "their impoverished 3rd world family needs the sweaty fat white guy's money..."
Anyone or anything that opposes them is branded the ever-intensifying epithet-of-the-week - "deplorable", "backward", "gun/bible clinging", "uncaring", "right-wing", "fascist", "conspiracy theorist", "extremist", "racist", "nazi", "oppressor", "transphobic", "threat to democracy", "terrorist", "literal genocidal maniac"...
So many "1st world games." People in Sudan aren't worried about being called a mean name. Children being raped *this*exact*minute by a drunk, rich westerner in a dirty South Asian back room don't have nightmares about "nazis." Congolese mothers holding their dying cobalt-miner children are not crying because there's a "threat to Democracy." Those are the people whose basic human rights the UN was *supposed* to be protecting. But no.
The UN/WHO/WEF are all incensed that individual countries have the temerity to go after people who rape kids. The gaul to condemn the exalted class for their hypocrisy. The unimaginable sense that their citizens might be permitted to question how the people doing the most harm in the world are being the most handsomely rewarded.
Call me whatever name you want. Except one of them.